Southerland are an up and coming duo based in Nashville, Tennessee. The duo are set to release their debut EP – Boot Up – this Friday. Here, we interview Southerland about the journey to the release.
Hello! How does it feel to be about to release this body of work? I can imagine it’s been years in the making.
We’re just excited that we are ready to get these songs out. It’s a nervous excitement for me – I’m so excited because we love these songs, but it’s anxious being a new artist. We’re rooted in traditional country – our biggest influences are Rascal Flatts, Brooks and Dunn, Alan Jackson, Shannon, Diamond Rio – we’re working out how to take all those influences and still make radio hits.
Talking about your influences when you guys first met, what was your individual sound like and what was it like when you met? Was it a very organic sonic transition?
It is 100% organic – everything about our story – there’s nothing fabricated about it at all. When we first met, we met through Ray Fulcher, who’s another writer here in town. He came over about four or five years ago – he was coming over to my house to write one day – and he was like, I got a buddy of mine, can we pull him in (it was Matt). So we wrote a song that day and within the first week, we’re out playing cover shows all over the place and that took us down to Key West to the songwriter festival and BMI every year. Lynn Oliver-Cline from Riverhouse happened to be down there and she saw us play on one of those shows. She said ‘I will sign you to a duo right now, right here in Key West.’ I mean we were never out playing these shows, thinking of becoming a duo. It was just super organic – we would sit on sit on stools and play these the songs bouncing back and forth. We started to sing harmonies with each other and we had everything in place, except for the songs and we didn’t have a name.
You can really hear that authenticity in your music and in your sound.
I’m telling you right place, right time, absolutely happenstance. When we decided to do the duo thing, looking back now it’s kind of crazy – we were functioning and performing as a duo, we just didn’t have a name or title on it. I remember we would play some hits at the cover gigs – we were playing 90s or 00s songs because that’s what we listen to. We just thought let’s jump in with two feet – what’s going to be our sound? We were both perfectly in line on that.
At least one of you wasn’t like ‘let’s bring in EDM here or something.’
(laughs) We don’t use any tracks or anything like that – I mean, all of our stuff is band driven. We know a lot of that has to do with us both being in town – we both have been here nine years at this point. We’ve been through the ups and downs of trying to figure out who we are individually, trying different avenues here and there.
So from that initial meeting to now this EP, how long has it been? Are these songs that you’ve had in your back pocket for years or are they ones that you’ve written over the past year.?
Some are probably from about four years ago. I think we ended up signing with Sony and Riverhouse in December 2018, something like that. We didn’t have a name at the time, we barely had any songs at the time, so Sony were like ‘go figure it out and come back to us.’ We kind of figured it out for about a year and a lot of these songs on the EP are compilations of that, but we also wrote a few on Zoom.
A lot of people have found that they are creatively uninspired – staying in four walls.
You know, when you’re not out living life, it’s hard to come up with songs to reflect that. It was actually weirdly a blessing in disguise, I think for us because we had a ton of time to spend writing the songs. We have so many songs that came out of last year.
It’s just all about perspective. Our biggest thing right now is just growing our name and getting out there in front of people whenever we can to play our music and gain followers and fans. We approach songwriting like ‘let’s write songs that we don’t mind playing for 20 years.’
Our thing is to not cheap out on the lyrics or not feel like you’re going in 40%. You have to spend as much time as you want, even if they’re simple songs, they just have that little something about them that makes them authentic. I think there’s a time and place for every type of song – some that are super heavy, some that are feel good. We try to cover it all and not cheap out on any tracks.
On this project you worked with Greg Bates. You guys did such a great job together creating a project that is immensely cohesive.
I know, Greg would appreciate hearing that – that was a huge goal of ours. When we met him, before we even had a name, we hooked up with him to start writing and we wrote ‘Dance.’ We just continued writing with him over the years and it got to the point where we thought there’s something special that we three have when we’re writing the song. He had some ideas on the production front and we trusted him with a lot of that stuff – that’s a foreign thing to us. Being with Greg and getting hands on with these last batch of songs has been awesome to see.
It’s probably also helpful to have someone external to help craft the project and decide which tracks to lead with?
Exactly – he’s a sounding board for us, he’s kind of a brother at this point. He was perfectly in tune with exactly what our direction was – we love traditional country music. We love that early country music sound but we also want to be relevant to people today. I remember Greg had a big radio hit – probably about eight years ago and his sound was exactly that.
It’s so current for now. I think people are also craving that authenticity in 2021 after the year we’ve had.
If we were to do anything else, it would be so inauthentic. At the end of the day, what you see is what you get with us – this is the music we love. It’s the nervous excitement because it’s different from a lot of stuff out there. Let’s hope that people like it.
I can already see London being down for this – this is the kind of music everyone over here loves. One of the tracks that pulled me in was ‘Came Out of Nowhere’ which is with one of my favorite songwriters in town – Jessi Alexander – can you talk about that?
Yeah, I had this idea – I had a direction of where I wanted to go with it. That was the first write we ever had with Jessi – walking in the room, we know who she is and the songs that she’s written. I was already a big fan of hers, but we told her the idea and the direction that we wanted to go in and the fact that she was excited about it and fully on board was awesome. She took that idea and ran with it. It’s one of my favourite songs off the EP. I can tell you that was one of the songs that as soon as we finished writing it, we know that it was a song for us. Talking about being authentic, that song is literally how I grew up – that’s my family. We always say this is our song tipping our hat to all the blue collar hard working folks out there and those little towns that make the world go round.
That’s one of the beautiful things about country music – it celebrates the people out there living their humble lives. In terms of the release, what do you hope that your fans are going to take away from the project?
The beautiful thing about it is because we’re still a baby act, this music will be our first introduction to a lot of new people. I want people to hear those traditional roots in this music – they’re not trying to be something they’re not, they’re not trying to hide behind all these crazy production things. It’s just flat out country music and songwriting.
We want people to know who we are. Basically, we have three songs out right now, which is a good representation of the sound that we want to chase, but you can only hear so much from three songs. We’re now adding four more to that.
Listening to the project, you can hear what you guys are about and what you’ll get from the live show and from studio albums. It’s a great rounded out project.
Greg told us one time when we were writing songs that the sound matters. At the end of the day, you want to be that group that people say, ‘Man, I’d love to have a beer with those guys.’ I will tell you that even if we’re lucky to have success, I never want to be something we’re not.
I have very high hopes for the EP – the UK is going to love it.
We wrote with Eric Paslay and he told us that playing country music in the UK is entirely different – those people are diehard country fans, and if they love you, they love you forever. We’re so excited to come see that.
Good luck for next week guys, we can’t wait to see you in the UK!
Thank you so much.
