3 Pairs of Boots Chase a Dreamy Atmosphere for Boot Scootin’
The Americana duo 3 Pairs of Boots, consisting of Laura Arias and Andrew Stern, have recently announced their album, Boot Scootin’, coming up on September 27th, 2024. It follows Long Rider and Mighty Love, with all three albums written, recorded, and produced at home. Among these albums, Boot Scootin’ shows a more marked pursuit of a dreamy atmosphere, drawing on their wide array of musical loves, whether in folk, rock, or country, and their previous experiences working in rock.
But, as usual with their albums, there’s a dynamic sense of movement between these different sonic elements, song by song, and Arias and Stern also continue to draw from their current life experiences as inspiration for their songs. Coming into the end of the pandemic period, embracing some major life-changes, including moving home and sending a son off to college, Arias and Stern tried to find the silver linings and dance their way into the future. I spoke with both Laura Arias and Andrew Stern about continuing to explore their musical alchemy for Boot Scootin’.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=20iqj5d4kfU%3Fsi%3DKsbZVNBzkV_BOD1T
Americana Highways: I have spoken with you two before about both Long Rider and Mighty Love, so I have a sense of the progression of those albums, but I don’t know much about Boot Scootin’ and how it came together. What has been going on with you since then?
Andrew Stern: It wasn’t the easiest time. We have a son who’s now 20, and during the last part of the pandemic, it was a really tough time for him. He and his friends really felt like they missed out on a couple of years of school. That was the time period where we were putting together the next record. He was ready to get out of high school and go on to the next step, so that last year was a tough year. We were a bit holed up at home, but if there’s an overall theme to the album, it’s a little bit of hope, and fun, and looking forwards to getting back to “normal.” That was my take on things.
Laura Arias: I feel the same. Also, prior to that time, we’d been working with another friend of ours, Wren, who would contribute lyrics, and she lives up in Seattle. She was busier and didn’t have a lot of time around then, so I said to Andrew, “Let’s just write as much as we can. We’ll write together, and we’ll write apart, and we’ll see what we come up with.” It was a freaky time period, and these are the songs that made it from that time. We didn’t record them all. I think “Boot Scootin’” was Andrew’s fantasy of having some fun, a dance tune.
Andrew: It was just something positive.
Laura: It was good that he brought something positive, because then I came in with “Dark Sun Rising.” It says “sun,” but it might as well be “son.” We had just sent our son off to college when I wrote that, and I was so miserable, so sad. That was tough.
Andrew: We each wrote about half the songs on the album. Mine, if you look at them, are a bit more hopeful. There are one or two relationship-type songs. I was trying to expand my songwriting techniques as I was writing.
Laura: I was writing songs differently, too. Andrew had given me a keyboard.
Andrew: Laura was having writer’s block, and she had always written on guitar. So for her birthday, I got her a keyboard, and all of the sudden, there were three or four songs about a month later. I think having a different perspective really helped her. I think we were both searching for new ways to learn about writing and writing about things that were touching us at that time. That’s where the album came from.
We’re a bit of an outlier in a sense, because, yes, we’re Americana, which is a very big umbrella, but we’re not straight bluegrass or country artists. It’s a mix of things, but we do tend to write songs that all touch on each other in some way. Also, when we write songs, I’ll go into production and then we’ll write a few more songs, and I’ll go into production again. This album took about nine months to record.
AH: Does that influence sound for you, having more room to experiment at home? I think that this album does have a lot of dreamy pop elements, and a little bit of rock ‘n roll. I know those are things that have always interested you. You give them more space on this album.
Laura: Yes it does and, yes, we do.
Andrew: That is the advantage of doing it at home. We both have those influences. I really love it when those elements meets country, like the Wrecking Ball record by Emmylou Harris, produced by Daniel Lanois, who did the great U2 records. He managed to combine the airiness and impressionistic style with these really beautiful and simple Harris songs with her haunting voice. There’s probably a little bit of that inspiration in this record.
With Laura’s songs, for me as a producer, it’s not that I’m trying to make a record sound a certain way, but I’m led to where we get to by the song itself. Like with “Dark Sun Rising,” it lent itself to a more atmospheric approach, whereas with “Please Tell Me,” which is a more of a relationship song, it’s swampy and bluesy. I let the song tell me where I should take it. We don’t have a “band” so to speak, so we create everything from the ground up in production. We go from me strumming an acoustic guitar and Laura singing to a full production. Then, looking back on the record, I hope I’ll see that the songs touch each other in some way.
AH: Are you kind of getting into your stride with home producing in a way that sets you up with new discoveries for future work?
Andrew: For our next record, we might take a completely different approach, and go to Nashville to record a more acoustic-driven record. We’ve done three or four records in a home studio, getting really good input from other musicians. I’m just curious to see what we could come up with if we wrote the songs in a shorter period of time, recorded it in a different studio, and finished it off here. I’m curious about something different.
AH: Does having more sonic layering on Boot Scootin’ affect how you might play them live?
Andrew: We have been rehearsing and thinking about playing live, and we’re transferring these very full production songs off the record into a very stripped-down form, with one acoustic bass, and one acoustic guitar.
Laura: We played a couple of gigs last year with a bunch of other musicians, a full band, and I felt like the sound changed again. They don’t really sound like the albums. It was a little bit punk, country, and rock! The response we got was great, but I was surprising. I was wondering, “Is this okay???”
AH: Laura, I think it’s great that you were asking yourself those questions about what you sound like. It’s uncomfortable, but exciting. Andrew, you’re also really surprising me when you mention U2 and Daniel Lanois, because I really thought that, “Upon a High Horse” sounded like a U2 song, but I would never have just said that to you out of the blue.
Andrew: [Laughs] The song just sort of leads me to a place where I think it belongs, and that one was the same. But two of my favorite albums by female country singers over the past few years have been Wrecking Ball, and The River & The Thread, by Roseanne Cash. I think that’s a brilliant record. That record’s interesting because she jumped in a car and did a tour of the South by finding spots that allowed her to reflect on her dad. The record has that country thing going, and yet it’s chock full of melodies and a dreamy approach. It’s different than Daniel Lanois, but it has stuff in common.
AH: Something that may prevent people experimenting with these combinations is that if fans are used to an artist doing one sound, they feel thrown for a loop with a more mixed approach.
Andrew: Well, another album that I find to be impressionistic, but still retains its bluesy, swampy feel is Dylan’s last record, Rough and Rowdy Ways.
AH: Yes, I’ve listened to that album pretty closely, and I’ve seen him perform twice on that tour. He played a lot of songs from that album. As long as you can clearly hear the lyrics, it’s pretty enthralling.
Andrew: The storytelling on that record is tremendous, I think. That’s kind of what we, in a general sense, are searching for. We are just looking for that magic for that great song. We’re not looking to write in one style, and that’s that. It’s really about letting our imagination and the songs tell us where to go. And then hoping that in production, they work together.
Laura: It’s so funny, too, when you say that, Andrew, because you don’t know this, but I think that you’re very clairvoyant in your production. [Laughs] When I came to you with “Reno,” I remember you going through various versions of the song. You were rearranging and rearranging, and it was like you were trying to feel your way into the correct arrangement, like reading braille. He took things out.
It’s so different from what I wrote, but I love it. I never would have come up with what you came up with. I feel like, in a way, you’re a psychic when it comes to arranging music. You go into your magic place, and you’re just some kind of mad scientist. What you come out with really surprises me sometimes.
Andrew: Hopefully in a good way!
Laura: It does! I’m just very matter-of-fact, saying, “Boom! Here’s what I wrote! Take it or leave it.” But you are highly experimental. Sometimes a song really needs that, and that’s collaboration. Sometimes the song really benefits from more than one hand on it.
Andrew: The thing I really loved about Rough and Rowdy Ways also was that there are some great ballads, then swampy songs, then the big 17-minute ode to the assassination of JFK. I also love how it was produced. It’s sort of a folk, country record, but it has that hint of atmospheric beauty to it, and his band are incredible. They have the most relaxed groove.
AH: It’s a stand-out album and stands above several of his other ones. The almost spoken-word aspects are pretty mesmerizing.
Andrew: He had done a record with Daniel Lanois, too, who helped him with his singing at a time that he was having some difficulty. That was years ago. I tend to write vocal lines that are a little similar to Dylan’s spoken-word-like approach, and Laura has to say to me, “Hey, I don’t sing like Dylan It’s got potential, but I can’t sing it like that!” So I have to revise my original memo on a song and write so that she can sing it like herself. Then, she finds an approach for each song.
AH: That’s funny, because earlier, Laura, you were saying what Andrew’s alchemy is in this process of working together. Now, Andrew, you’re suggesting what Laura’s alchemy is, that just by finding a vocal style for each song that works for her makes it a very different song. It’s a different combination.
Andrew: Certainly, with the songs that I’ve written, when we’re tracking in the studio, Laura will just, without thinking about it, spontaneously come up with ways to sing songs that I never would have thought of. I stop and say, “That’s great! Do it that way!” She’s very good and consistently coming up with almost stream-of-consciousness ways of singing and finding parts that I never could have come up with. I may have fixed ideas about the song, but all of the sudden, they take a left turn, because she has just come up with something that is so great. And I think, “That’s it! Let’s do it!”
Thanks very much for chatting with us, Andrew and Laura. Find more of the latest on 3 Pairs of Boots here on their website: https://www.3pairsofboots.com/
Enjoy our previous interview here: Interview: 3 Pairs Of Boots’ Andrew Stern Shares The Western Roots Of Mighty Love
