4 minute read
making music on mountain time
Kyle & Natalie Archer | Archertown
Article & images by Megan Crawford
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Life moves in ways that we don’t expect— time, circumstance, people, place— it takes us. The whats and what whys are muddied, but it takes us either way. For Kyle and Natalie Archer, it began in 2006 in an elevator in New York City.
From Montana to California to New York to Tennessee and back to Montana, the Archers have journeyed together through life. What began as a chance introduction on their way to a recording studio turned into playing together at the Bitter End in front of a producer who signed them onto a production deal. And so came the early days of Archertown.
Archertown performing at Under the Big Sky in Whitefish, MT
Image by Mark Gallup, 2019
Although the duo has gone through names, genres, and cities, their core has stayed the same: creating music together. After their meeting in New York, Kyle moved to the city to be closer to Natalie, who was living in Connecticut at the time. A year later, they headed back to California, where Kyle was going to school, and played together as a duo. From California, they moved to Nashville, just a few months before their wedding in Montana.
Throughout all of the moves, they continued to write and perform. When they were in Nashville, they received a publishing deal and took on the name Archertown.
Their songwriting process starts with a spark— a lyric, a melody, a title, a story— and the rest begins to fall into place from there. “We love writing lots of different genres, and we love writing for lots of different types of artists, people, and projects,” Natalie notes. From country to pop to rock to folk, they bend genres in their writing. In their personal work, though, the duo stays with a contemporary country sound.
Natalie & Kyle
Megan Crawford
While they’ve drawn inspiration from different artists (Kyle noting O.A.R. and John Mayer, Natalie reminiscing on the classic early oughts group, No Doubt), they both found an early love for music in the classic country artists their fathers listened to. Kyle’s love for playing and creating music goes back to his childhood, and before they met in New York, Natalie performed solo and was a lead actress on the television series “Rescue Me,” where she worked for seven years. It was during that time that she met Kyle, and the two began their musical journey.
When asked which song is one of their favorites, Kyle and Natalie both noted “10 Years From Now,” a love song that they wrote to each other in Nashville. The song came about from a conversation the two had about how far they’d come and where they could be in ten years— it was the first song the duo co-wrote after their move to the music city:
Not long after their wedding in 2013, at the age of 24, Natalie was diagnosed with Leukemia. After five months of treatment, they decided to take a step away from music and make the move back to Montana for a fresh start and to be closer to family. For the eight years prior, Kyle and Natalie were constantly going— writing almost every day and traveling from New York to Los Angeles to Nashville. “Since we were living in Nashville at the time and writing every day, music felt like a link to this terrible event that had taken place in our lives, and we needed a clean break. All we wanted to do at that time was focus on getting healthy and living our life to the fullest in Montana.”
Kyle, Natalie, and John at Under the Big Sky, 2019
Kyle and Natalie welcomed their sweet baby boy, Boden, into the world in March 2019, and in October, Natalie celebrated five years of being cancer-free. “It’s been a resurgence of our music and our passion for it… [Boden] inspires us every day. He’s our little miracle after everything,” she recalls. Now, at home in Montana, music is even more joyous— it’s something they can do together without stress or pressure. From summer gigs around the Flathead Valley with Kyle’s longtime friend, John, to performing at the 2019 Under The Big Sky festival in Whitefish, it’s a new beginning for Archertown.
In December 2019, Archertown recorded a new EP at Snowghost Studios in Whitefish with musicians from Portland and Los Angeles. It’s slated to be released in February with six songs, four being new tracks. They’ll also be performing at the 2020 Under The Big Sky festival in Whitefish in July.
archertownmusic.com | apple music | spotify | soundcloud @archertownmusic
— Walt Whitman
Natalie, Boden, & Kyle
Megan Crawford
