There’s something about the bend of the mandolin, the rustle of the guitar, the gale-like wave of the vocal melody…, that calls you to adventure.
Songwriting duo Emily Burns and Aaron Markovitz have always been adapting. The two Michiganders met as individual music makers in the blues open-mic circles; then they studied their craft together in California, and wound up taking to the seas to cover Top 40 hits for a cruise ship’s dance hall.
After that, they started a southern rock-inclined neo-country quartet called Escaping Pavement. But most of their fans started finding them after 2014, when they kept their intrepid-sounding name but pared down to just a duo. With just their voices, an acoustic guitar and a mandolin, they wrote and recorded an album (The Night Owl) that was heavy on melody-slung Americana and rollicking, twangy ballads that attained a radiance through their magnificent harmonies.
Now, they’re adapting again, this time as Road Warriors.
In this interview spotlight, I chat with Escaping Pavement about their latest project, challenges, technology and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)
We are from Ferndale, MI which is just outside the city limits of Detroit, MI and we play, what we like to call, “Detroit-Bluegrass”. We like to call it that because our style of writing & playing, is heavily influenced by traditional bluegrass music but it’s also equally influenced by our past musical experiences. Which has included playing in rock bands, southern-rock-style groups, blues bands, and jazz groups. So the “bluegrass” we play comes with a heavy aire of some of the more popular types of music to have come out of the motor city. It’s basically an amalgamation of our musical past.
What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to keep going?
What led us down this particular path towards bluegrass music can be marked by two exact moments: transitioning from a quartet to just a duo to allow for more touring/traveling, and Aaron purchasing a mandolin. In 2014 Escaping Pavement went from being a four-piece outfit (electric guitars/bass/drums) to just being two people (myself & Aaron). The bass player and drummer that we had been playing with had full-time jobs/careers, they had children, got married, and it became impossible for us to do much touring at all.
So we made the decision to shift gears and just take ourselves out on the road. And subsequently, the music we were creating began shifting more towards something that was based around the soundscape two people could make all on their own. Aaron actually bought a mandolin way back in 2008 but had never really played it much. When we transitioned to the duo, I started playing the acoustic guitar more and Aaron decided the mandolin would be a better compliment to the acoustic and these decisions created a whole shift in our music.
How is this new release different than previous ones? Were you trying to accomplish anything specific?
Road Warrior is definitely the recording that has the most focused representation of who we are and what we sound like as a group. It’s taken us awhile to get here but I feel like we’re finally settling into this syle/genre and really honing in on what it is. For myself, personally, I feel it has some of my best vocal work and guitar work, to date.
Name one or two challenges you face as an indie musician in this oversaturated, digital music age? How has technology helped you (since we know it does help)?
Ah! The challenges seem to be endless, don’t they? Haha. Being an indie musician is certainly not an easy path in life to take, especially if you’re doing it full time like we are. The digital age has definitely helped and hindered musicians in many ways but for us personally, YouTube has helped us greatly by giving us a platform to upload live performance videos which allows venues to see exactly what we do and what we are like live-which I feel has made it infinitely easier to book shows.
In the time between the “Home-recording” revolution, and the advent of YouTube, it became so easy for people to doctor their recordings so much that people who could barely play an instrument or sing, were sounding like professionals and it slowly became clear to talent buyers, presenters, promoters, etc, that listening to a “studio” recording of music was no longer a valid way to judge people’s talent. So we’re really grateful that YouTube is around because a live performance video is still a pretty hard thing to doctor without it becoming really obvious.
Spotify is definitely another digital thing that has been a challenge. I feel as though most people still aren’t aware of just how little musicians make from streams. The avg is around $.006 per stream. It’s just an awful number. And the advent of Spotify has caused less people to buy CDs online or at shows. But! Spotify has also become the new “market-indicator” of success in the music business so, if you encourage people to buy your music outright instead of stream it (which makes you more money), you’re decreasing your chances of being noticed by larger players in the music biz. But also, encouraging people to stream your music instead of buying it may increase your Spotify plays but it also doesn’t guarantee that it’ll get you noticed by someone who could really make a difference in your career. It feels a lot like a rock and a hard place.
What was the last song you listened to?
Sara Bareilles’ new album. I became a big fan of hers back in 2007 (?) when her debut album came out but she kind of fell off my radar for awhile as we dove deeper into roots music. But seeing that her new album was produced by T-Bone Burnett made me IMMEDIATELY want to listen to it. We both love pretty musch anything T-Bone Burnett touches. In our opinion, the man is amazing and it would certainly be a dream come true to work with him.
Which do you prefer? Vinyl? CDs? MP3s?
We pressed our last full length record on vinyl and have definitely been buying our fair share of it since it started making a comeback. We both feel it’s definitely still the best sounding format for listening. It provides such a depth to the sound spectrum that is just not possible with mp3’s or cd’s. But since we do so much driving, we don’t get to listen to vinyl quite as much as we’d like to. In the car it’s almost always cd’s and iTunes libraries.
How about this one…. Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?
I guess I kind of answered this one in the questions above! We prefer CDs, vinyl, or mp3’s.
Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?
You can connect with us on Facebook.com/escapingpavementband, twitter.com/Escape_Pavement, instagram.com/escapingpavement, and youtube.com/escapingpavement. Also at our home site, escapingpavement.com. And then there’s also that spotify profile….haha. If you feel so inclined, go check out our new EP on spotify and stream the hell out of it.
Anything else before we sign off?
We’ll be on tour all summer and in many different areas of the country so if we’ll be in your neck of the woods, come on out and hang with us! We love meeting and chatting with folks at all of the different types of shows we do. Everything from house concerts to festivals, breweries to performing arts centers and everything in between.
