The Secret Sisters photo by David McClister
The Secret Sisters Bring Their Real Lives To Mind, Man, Medicine
The Secret Sisters, consisting of duo Laura Rogers and Lydia Slagle, released their fifth studio album, titled Mind, Man, Medicine, recently via New West Records. It’s their first since 2020’s Saturn Return, which earned them a Grammy nomination. It covers a period of their lives where the world faced plenty of turmoil, but also a time when both became immersed in family life and raising young children. For that reason, Mind, Man, Medicine comes from a slightly different place and carries with it a kind of reckoning, a new understanding of the roles of different types of relationships in our lives and the meaningful choices we make.
While the songs on the album do not fit any traditional assumptions about love songs, they do express connections, and while the album sounds very much like a Secret Sisters record, it also shakes off any particular assumptions you might have of sonic boundaries. You’ll hear electric guitars, synths, and sonic flourishes that give the album a very modern feel alongside its timeless qualities, all captured in the historic FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. I spoke with Laura Rogers and Lydia Slagel about this span of time in their lives, and how they see the songwriting and the sound of the album in the context of their past and future.
Americana Highways: I really appreciate where this album is coming from. I also thought the little statement that you made about the album and the time period that is covers is really powerful. To me, it feels almost like an album of love songs, though that didn’t occur to me until after I had listened to it all. What do you think of that? Is that too reductive.
Laura Rogers: I don’t think that is too reductive. I think that what you say makes so much sense because I also didn’t think of this record as a collection of love songs because that’s now how we approached it from the front. But when we came back at it, we saw that it is a collection of love songs, but of course it’s so much more than just romantic love. There are so many different kinds of love on this record, and speaking about facets of each of those. I think that’s a completely fair assessment of the songs.
Lydia Slagel: I think these are all about relationships from different avenues. Some we wrote with our kids in mind. Some we wrote about our spouses. Some were about friendships. Like Laura said, we didn’t try to approach this from that point of view, they just kind of came out, and I think it’s a picture of where we are in our lives right now. We’re really honed in on our relationships right now and trying to stay there.
Laura: But if you had told me, “Hey, we want you to write a record of love songs!”, I would probably have vomited! [Laughs] I don’t want to sit down and write about love! I want to be pensive! I want to write about darkness! But our ambition, when it comes to records, is always to write from a personal place, because it’s the only way that we know how to write.
But also, to write in such a way that whoever is hearing it can take it and wear it. I might be writing a song about how I don’t think that I could ever live without my kids anymore, but I want someone who doesn’t have kids to hear that song and think about someone who makes them feel that way. We may be specific and personal in what we write, but we want something that other people can take in their own way. I hope that we’ve accomplished that.
AH: Are you all writing all the time, or was there a period where you had to say, “We’re going to make another record, so let’s get going.”
Lydia: I think it’s more that. I think that we have to approach songwriting, especially for this time in our lives, very intentionally. We have to schedule for three days at a time, whether we’re going to Nashville to write with other people, or whether we schedule a retreat that’s just the two of us. Otherwise, it won’t happen, because we’re just in total mom-land right now. It’s impossible. We set out to write songs, and when we do that, we’re usually thinking with a record in mind. Whenever we start to write, though, we don’t say, “This is going to be the common thread through these songs.” Because the thread sort of reveals itself once we’re ready to make the record. We try not to dwell too much on that.
Laura: Agreed.
AH: I think for a lot of people, that’s true. There are things that you have to make time for or you won’t have them in your life. It’s a fine line. I’m sure it benefits you all, personally, to work on music, too.
Lydia: I think we’re, admittedly, people with one-track minds. When we’re in mom-mode, it’s hard to put our efforts into different places.
Laura: Also, it’s a lot scarier to have a four-year-old screaming at you than your manager! I have to answer to my four-year-old first!
AH: That’s so true. They are much more tenacious. Did you feel that there was extra weight or pressure on you this time because your previous album received so much attention and was so well received?
Lydia: I didn’t feel that pressure.
Laura: I didn’t feel that pressure recording the record. But I do have to work through that now, now that the record is coming out. People are starting to hear it and we’ll start playing it in shows. Now comes the part where I have to untangle myself from expectations. The thing that we’ve been fortunate with is that each of our records have done a little better than the previous one, and especially with the last two. It does sometimes feel like we’ve got to top the last one. It is something that I am learning to be okay with and process. I’m learning to let go.
Ultimately, I make records to say what I need to say, and I do believe that the records will mean something to the people that they are made for. I think a lot of it is, too, that we don’t have the capacity to push this record the way that we have in the past. We can’t just hop on a plane and promote this record across the country. It has to be very planned out and spaced out and we have other priorities. We don’t have the luxury of spontaneity. But I have to remember that this season of life is so fleeting and yes, we are in the throes of motherhood.
It’s intense, but it’s so beautiful, and it’s such a tiny sliver of time. Thankfully, we are on the same page, saying, “I will not sacrifice time with my kids and getting to be here for all their milestones just so I might get a Grammy nomination.” It’s not a fair trade for us. So much of the song material on this record reflects that shift in our attitude. The music industry will always be there.
Lydia: I think we have to base a lot of trust in our audience and our fans because of everything Laura just said. They are still going to be there even if we might not be touring as much right now. Hopefully, they will still care about our music. We just feel very at peace and content with where we are right now. It’s not that we don’t care about our music, but our priorities have shifted somewhat.
AH: I really appreciate the unexpected things that turn up in your songs that work so well. You would not think it was the romantic thing to call someone a “Paperweight” in your life.
Lydia: That’s so true! [Laughs] And I would never use that in a sentence, “You’re my paperweight.” He’d be like, “What??”
AH: It’s a sort of uplifting and validating thing that the speaker is saying that they have a free-spirted or wandering personality. That’s often seen more negatively in society. This song balances the positives and negatives of personality types.
Lydia: You’re spot-on there. When we were writing the song, I approached that as someone who’s easily persuaded. I’m not proud of that. When we wrote that, I was thinking of my husband who tends to ground me. I would say that about a lot of my relationships. They help me remember who I am and where I come from.
AH: How hard was it to finesse these lyrics? I ask because they are often pretty intricate. Are you going through multiple drafts when you’re songwriting?
Laura: I feel like it’s different depending on each song. Most of the songs, I don’t think we spend a lot of time really hammering out lyrics. We just kind of come to them. In sessions where we were co-writing with other people, it felt that way too. Someone would shout out a line and we’d say, “Ooooh that’s good. Let’s rhyme it with this other one!” How did that go on “Paperweight,” Lydia?
Lydia: We didn’t fret on that one. It started with an instrument, actually. Kate York, who we wrote that song with, had her electric guitar out that day, and I never write on an electric guitar. She just started playing some chords and it made me think of 90s Country greats, and we just got a melody going. I’m not really sure how the lyrics came about. It was probably some random line I’d written down and we had a conversation and expanded on it. It came to life within an hour. Some come easily, and some do not! Some take weeks, months, or even years. Songs have their own story and their own life.
AH: You mentioned the electric guitar, and that’s a good topic regarding this album. Do you see a sound difference with this album in comparison with what you’ve done before, or see it as a continuation?
Lydia: I would love to experiment with more instrumentation, especially live. In the past, we’ve usually traveled as a duo, and so when that’s the case, we don’t really have a lot of hands to carry an extra guitar or keyboard. I’m excited to see if we can bring out players a little more often moving forward and have a little bit of a different sound. It definitely inspires songwriting. I would definitely not have gone in that direction had Kate not pulled out an electric guitar that day. Instruments can completely change your thought-process.
Laura: Lydia is better at this than I am, since she has a lot more eclectic taste in music than I do. Lydia showed up to most of our writing sessions and recording sessions with these out-of-left field musical and sonic inspirations. They were out of our comfort zone but really fun to dabble in. We wanted to do stuff that was a little bit out of the box. We wanted it to still sound like what we do, but we wanted to be a little less rigid in terms of what instruments and what atmospheres we put on the record. I think on a few of the songs, you can certainly hear our attempts at getting uncomfortable. It was certainly uncomfortable for me! [Laughs]
Lydia: Sometimes it can be hard to write a song that’s really eclectic with just an acoustic guitar. If we wanted to experiment with that, sometimes we needed to have different instruments around.
AH: I think each song is pretty different and I think, in terms of a spectrum, you let yourselves move around within that spectrum. I did appreciate a lot of the layers and touches that brought together acoustic and electric elements. There was a breeziness to it that made it look easy, but I’m sure it wasn’t.
Lydia: I feel like we can attribute most of that to Ben Tanner and John Paul White, who co-produced this record. They just saw the songs in some different ways and were able to think outside the box. They thought of different layers and sounds to add in the background that we would never have known to think of. Production is something that they handled really beautifully.
AH: In that way, I think this does up the ante in terms of what you’ll allow yourselves to do in future.
Lydia: I know! Am I going to have to bring a synth on the road? [Laughs] Is this going to be who I am now?
AH: One of the songs that has an electronic element is “All The Ways.” And it also made me thinking about how you recorded at FAME this time and the way that might have impacted the sound.
Laura: For sure. Truthfully, we were not sure that “All The Ways” was going to be on the record because it’s the only one that’s a straight-up love song.
Lydia: It seemed too obvious.
Laura: John Paul wanted to cut it for the record, especially since we were recording at FAME. He felt that we could make it cool and have it not be too much of a ripping off of soul music, but rather paying tribute. Once we decided to put it on the record, it felt really special to record that song in FAME thinking of all the giants that had stood in that same room. There’s definitely an energy that finds its way into the songs. When we recorded the song, initially, we had not planned to have Ray LaMontagne on it. It was good and we were proud of it. But when Ray agreed to be on it and he sent in his contributions, it was like…
Lydia: “That’s what it’s supposed to be!”
Laura: It was really fun to take a voice like Ray’s and add it. If you took Ray back 50 years and placed him at the studio at FAME, he would have made a killer soul record there.
AH: Absolutely.
Laura: It was fun to take someone who has, to my knowledge, never recorded there, and to put him on a song that was inspired by that very place. That was such a perfect match. It’s like it was just meant to be that way and it was up to us to put all the pieces in place.
Lydia: When you write a song like that, which harkens back to that specific sound, and then record it at a place like FAME, you feel a little bit of pressure to make it really great. That’s where so much of that stuff originated, so we really tried to pay tribute to that respectfully and to give a nod to the Shoals sound.
Thanks very much for speaking with us, Lydia and Laura! Find more information about the Secret Sisters here on their website: https://www.secretsistersband.com/