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Event
The Rough and Tumble and Escaping Pavement
The Rough & Tumble used to say that they used to say they were from Nashville, TN. But nearing the end of their third year on the road full time with their original rescue tour dog, Butter*, and her kid sister, Puddle, who was picked up along the way in Alabama, its hard to say if they are from anywhere at all. Pennsylvania-born Mallory Graham and California-born Scott Tyler have lived in their 16 camper since 2015, making tire tracks nationwide since 2011 as a folk-Americana duo. Their history goes back as far as New England in the fall of 2007 and as close as going from friends to bandmates to married bandmates. The story is as linear and circular as any, but one thing stands out:
Their home is the road. But also, its not.
With the release of their first full length record, We Made Ourselves a Home When We Didnt Know (2018), the folk-Americana duo retraces their mileage back to their footsteps and explores the struggle between going home and being home already when there's no other home and everywhere is home. Recorded in East Nashville with Dave Coleman, The Rough & Tumble invited a couple of musician friends from their sad-singer-songwriter and rock-n-roll-rebel days to accompany them on a portrait of what has happened so far, and what they hope is still to come.
We Made Ourselves a Home When We Didnt Know comes after a long line of first EPs (three, to be exact from 2011-2012); a year-long, 24-song, tongue-in-cheek writing project called The Rough & Tumbles Holiday Awareness Campaign (2013); a soundtrack for a short film about women, war, and PTSD called Pieces and Pieces (2016); and their latest EP, Cardboard and Christmas Lights [(2017)( Rock Candy Recordings)].
Prolific songwriters and born-travelers, The Rough & Tumble are already planning their 2018 on the road, spanning from coast-to-coast, and are writing toward a late 2019 release. They are willing to consider stopping, should the music run out of them and the road end. But until then, they are likely cross referencing a map to a calendar at this very moment for a show near you.
*In November 2017, they lost their best pal, Butter-- a tough blow that brought the crew back to three, and to whom their recent release is dedicated.
From Detroit to Pasadena, to the high seas and then back to Detroit; its only when singer/songwriter duo Emily Burns and Aaron Markovitz escaped the neon blitz and car-strewn concrete of the city that they discovered how well their music could bloom when they brought it back to the roots. There is so much life and vitality in the Americana-folk journeys of Escaping Pavement, sprung entirely from an acoustic guitar, a mandolin, and two voices. Fiery passion, wistful reflection, awestruck adventurousness, and heartstring-plucking poignancy, the duo discovers, through song, the range of human emotion and celebrates the purities of what weve left behind for the artifices of tech trends, drug stores and cacophonous city centers.
Their romance together came only after they started singing songs together, having met in 2005, as teenagers, at an open-mic night. From there, they would continue collaborating in several other bands together, but they stepped up their game when they both got accepted to the Los Angeles College of Music. When they graduated, they hopped a cruise ship as part of a band running through covers of Top 40s hits for waltzing baby-boomers. They came back to Detroit, but discovered that after two years of singing songs together on that cruise ship, for four hours a day, seven days a week, their singing voices had become fused into a perfect harmony.
Started in 2012, Escaping Pavement released their debut, Uprooted in the summer of 2013, with the stomp of drums and the growl of the guitars giving it more of a blues-rock feel. However, soon after, Burns and Markovitz felt their inspirations being drawn toward the sounds of folk, country, bluegrass and Americana, and so Escaping Pavement became a duo, with unplugged string instruments, and centered on the surest magic of their musical collaboration, their voices in melodic unison. The grit and swagger of Burn This Bridge (from Uprooted) sounds a world away from Fuel The Fire, the lead single from 2016s The Night Owl, where the eureka being shared by its two singers is palpable, that theyve discovered their natural environment. That the music they make should, itself, sound like a natural environment.
The talent, the chemistry, the holistic mindset, it shines in every song. Burns and Markovitz have dismissed glitz and glamour, no amp feedback or laser light shows, no bandwagons hopped nor convoluted fusing of disparate subgenres; just the beauty of acoustic music and the warm rejuvenation of two vocal intonations that perfectly complement one another.
The Detroit-Music-Award winning album, The Night Owl was released in summer of 2016, and songs like Fuel The Fire, Derailed, and Mary crackle and shine with the synchronicity theyve built up over a dozen years together. With Escaping Pavement, were reminded about how vital of an instrument the human voice can be, how much a shared relationship manifests harmonic magic, and how restorative it can be, as a listener, to get back to the basics, the roots, the acoustic timbres and twangs, the elegance of which we may have forgotten while we were distracted by billboards, nightclubs and Instagram feeds How wonderful it is, to escape the pavement, and get some dirt, and gravel under your shoes again. Have you escaped the pavement, lately?
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LocationTrinity House Theatre (View)
38840 West Six Mile
Livonia, MI 48152
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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