The duo play two nights at the Music Farm in October
Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent perform at the 2024 High Water festival, which they curated for the final time in April. (The duo announced in May that they had ended their partnership with festival organizers.)
“I’d be lying if I told you/That I never felt the same desire/Patching the cracks/When it seems easier/To set your own house on fire,” sing Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent in perfect, seemingly effortless harmony on “I’d Be Lying.” It’s the third track on Shovels & Rope’s Something Is Working Up Above My Head, a 10-song collection that finds the Charleston couple managing parenthood, middle age, and the loss of their beloved dog.
Hearst wrote the lyrics for “I’d Be Lying” in 2023, acknowledging “how common it is to feel like burning your life down.” Trent developed the melody and ascending chorus while she was out of town. “After all these years, we’re still learning to write together,” says Hearst, lamenting the time management required to balance parenting and co-creativity. “But that song’s process felt like it could have a buddy movie montage with high fives at the end.”
Since Shovels & Rope’s song “Birmingham” blew up in 2012, Hearst and Trent have navigated raising two children, producing six studio albums, and following a busy touring schedule. A decade of creating together has their “egos connected on a chain,” Hearst says.
That all-in-together vibe is evident from the opening lines of the album’s title track. “Up above me/Something is working,” they sing, ostensibly about a critter building a nest in the attic but with deeper layers that allude to a spiritual realm. “Dass Hymn,” the closing track, bookends the ethereal rumination as the duo sings in homage to the late spiritual leader Ram Dass, “I will radiate my vibration/Till my body is but dust again/And my soul is unconfined.”
Shovels & Rope releases its latest album on September 6 and plays at the Music Farm on October 3 and 4.
In between, the couple taps into teenage rock ’n’ roll spirit with “Piranhanana,” delivers a rowdy Western murder ballad in “Colorado River,” and reflects on the adoration of a pet toward its owners with the touching “Love Song From a Dog,” whose video features footage from the life of their longtime, wet-nosed, touring companion, Townes. The song ends with the couple howling in beautiful unison. “There’s probably some kind of supernatural vibrational thing that happens with howls,” Hearst muses. “It speaks to the primal, animal self. We become the dog there a little bit.”
“Love Song From a Dog” is one of two songs on the record with acoustic guitar, yet the collection is as raw as any since Shovels & Rope’s debut. Each song was recorded live at the couple’s home studio on John’s Island, using instrumentation that could be reproduced on stage. “This is the first time we’ve taken a handful of songs, worked them out on the road, and taken them into the studio with confidence about how we might like them to go,” Hearst says.
After a September tour rocking crowds across the US, the duo returns to Charleston for two nights at the Music Farm on October 3 and 4, followed by an autumn at home spent gardening and seeing old friends. Eventually, Hearst says they’ll retire from the road to a “houseful of dogs, good ones and bad ones, turtles and lizards, rats and hamsters.”
In the meantime, something is working for Shovels & Rope, and the duo is out there spreading the word. “I feel really positive about this album,” says Trent. “I don’t know if we’ve ever been as excited to tour a record—maybe ever.”
WATCH: The touching music video for Shovels & Rope’s “Love Song From a Dog” written about their pup, Townes.
