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SXSW preview: The Watson Twins
To witness Leigh and Chandra Watson perform side by side is to know instantly that the two sisters were born four minutes apart in 1975.
It’s not even the eerie sight of two nearly identical women singing that tips you off — although there’s a definite element of double vision to watching the Watson Twins take to the stage. No, it’s their voices — the duo croon the kind of perfectly matched pastoral harmonies that you could hear only from identical twins, or by cloning Natalie Merchant.
They received their highest profile job backing Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis on her solo debut, 2006’s ‘Rabbit Fur Coat,’ adding a dash of ’70s folk-pop harmonies to Lewis’ country-fried soul. On debut album ‘Fire Songs,’ they evoked Linda Ronstadt and Neil Young across 11 tracks of spare, naked Americana. ‘Fire Songs’ was simple and unadorned. It was pure. It was quiet. It was … a little boring sometimes, actually. Certainly quite good, just a little anemic.
Somewhat surprisingly, Leigh Watson kind of agrees.
‘We were backup singers for 10 years, so we were very confident letting that bolder part of our singing come out in that role. But when we started to move to the forefront and do our own thing, I think there was a sort of timidness,’ she says. ‘And we knew we could tackle that singer-songwriter Americana thing, which was a very comfortable place for us.’
The sisters are substantially less timid now. At South by Southwest, they’re promoting this month’s release of sophomore album ‘Talking To You, Talking To Me,’ a smoky, sexy soul record that unfolds gracefully and seductively, paying homage to R&B greats like Candi Staton and Shirley Brown. If ‘Fire Songs’ was an album for Sunday afternoons spent reclining on the patio after church — and it was — ‘Talking To You, Talking To Me’ is a late-night record, an ideal companion to starlight and Stolichnaya.
The songs are concerned with love and devotion, heartbreak and experience. Muscular instrumentation, from the gospel organ on ‘Devil In You’ to the languid electric guitar on ‘Forever Me,’ comes courtesy of members of Everest and My Morning Jacket’s Bo Koster. And the twins largely abandon singing harmonies in favor of having each song’s writer sing lead vocals, with the other twin going to bat as the backing vocalist.
The new direction, Leigh Watson says, is all a result of the confidence that’s come with the Watson Twins’ gradually blooming career.
‘When we started writing these songs we had gained confidence in ourselves and our singing and weren’t afraid to push the boundaries and explore other parts of our ranges and other parts of our voices,’ she says. ‘We felt like this record was a real dialogue between the two of us’ — hence the title — ‘and that we were on the same page and having the same conversation. Whenever we agree on something we know we have the right idea, and we both had these soulful ideas at the same time.’
The Watsons started their singing careers early, joining their church choir at 8 years old. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, they were singled — doubled? — out by their choir teacher, who recognized their talents. They picked up guitars and songwriting in high school, and started dabbling with playing in bands at the University of Evansville.
But they really found their groove in Los Angeles, where they moved after college and quickly became integrated with the burgeoning Silver Lake music scene. They marveled at an environment where they’d see Beck or Elliott Smith at the grocery store, and performed with other area artists including Slydell, Orphan Train and Rilo Kiley. The Los Angeles environment helped them foster connections, but when it came time to assemble the songs on ‘Talking To You, Talking To Me,’ they had to steal away from its multitude of diversions.
‘Recording in L.A. is sometimes difficult, because it’s all “Oh, we have a meeting,” or “Oh, we’re going to dinner now,” or “Oh, I have to go pick my boyfriend up.” We’re always busy and the people we work with are always busy. So we needed to pick a place and time and not have any of the distractions of our lives.’
So they took a page from the Bon Iver playbook, and departed for a cabin in the Sierra Mountains, just outside Yosemite National Park, with little but some mikes and guitars, a drum kit and a copy of Garage Band. Across four days in a primitive environment, they recorded the demos that formed the backbone of ‘Taking To You, Talking To Me.’
‘There was no phone, no TV, no nothing. It was just us in the middle of the mountains in a cabin that was built in 1900,’ she says. ‘There were bats and squirrels and bugs and us. That was key.’
Not that ‘Talking To Me, Talking To You’ sounds rustic. It’s an atmospheric, warm record, more cosmopolitan than cowboy. But there is a purity to it that reflects those rural sessions, and, more the point, nicely encapsulates the sisters’ straightforward, nigh-biological motivations for playing music.
‘We do it because, like for anyone who plays music hopefully, it’s part of us and we need to do it like we need to eat,’ Leigh Watson says. ‘It’s part of your soul that you feel like you have to feed. For me, I’ve tired to step away from it before and gotten discouraged, but you always come back to it.’
9 p.m. Saturday at Central Presbyterian Church, 200 E. Eighth St.
If you like the Watson Twins, check out:
1. The Living Sisters
2. Dana Falconberry
3. The Chapin Sisters
4. The Trishas
5. Shelby Lynne
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