The Secret Sisters play songs from 'Mind, Man, Medicine' at The Current
by Bill DeVille
June 09, 2024
The Secret Sisters’ fifth studio album, Mind, Man, Medicine, released on March 29, 2024, on New West Records. As part of the record release, The Secret Sisters — Laura Rogers and Lydia Slagle — visited the Twin Cities in May for two sold-out shows at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis. Between shows, The Secret Sisters visited The Current for a session hosted by Bill DeVille. Watch and listen to the session above, and read an interview transcript below.
Interview Transcript
Bill DeVille: Well, hey, I'm Bill DeVille. And I'm here with Laura Rogers and Lydia Slagle. Nice to see you both.
Lydia Slagle: Nice to be here.
Laura Rogers: For sure.
Bill DeVille: How's it going?
Lydia Slagle: It's good. It's going.
Bill DeVille: I take it you're in the midst of a tour right now.
Lydia Slagle: We are. Yeah, we are on the last of four shows on this little run in Minneapolis. Yeah, we've just released a record a couple of months ago, and so we're just doing shows here and there. Not too much. We've got little kids at home, so we try to keep a good balance of shows and home life. But yeah, it's been great.
Bill DeVille: So let's take take the listeners back to the very beginning. Now you were kids that sang in church, right? So, and I read someplace that you were meant to be solo artists, both of you. So how did it work out that you started the Secret Sisters?
Lydia Slagle: I don't know if we were meant to be solo artists. I certainly wanted to be a singer my whole life. I always sang, you know, at family reunions, and at Four H talent shows growing up, and Laura had horrible stage fright, and would not do any of that until she auditioned for a record label that was holding open auditions in Nashville, just to conquer her stage fright.
Laura Rogers: I did not want to record deal. I did not want to be an artist I just wanted to be able to sing at a campfire with my friends.
Lydia Slagle: And she did that on her own. And they liked her voice and started talking record deals. And she was like, "Hang on. I have a sister. I would love for you to hear her." So I drove up to Nashville from our hometown. And they liked me too. And all of a sudden, Dave Cobb, who was one of the judges on the panel—
Bill DeVille: Who's like "Mr. It" Americana producer nowadays.
Lydia Slagle: Right! Yeah. He asked if we ever sing anything together, and we knew that we could but never really had. So we sang like two songs that we knew and could sing together, and the rest is history. Two months after that we had a deal and been going ever since, that was 2009.
Bill DeVille: Yeah. And I recall, it must have been '10, you came here and we did a session. I believe we had a lovely chat. And I think we did another one at Americana Fest a few years later.
Lydia Slagle: Yeah, you're probably right.
Laura Rogers: Long relationship here!
Bill DeVille: So it's so nice to see you. How did you get through the pandemic? Was that ... how did you navigate that as musicians?
Laura Rogers: We had babies.
Lydia Slagle: We had babies. It was a very tumultuous pandemic, for us and for so many others.
Laura Rogers: There were not a lot of, there was really no navigating for us. I mean, we did the kind of typical, you know, live stream performances where people can contribute money digitally. We did make an EP during the pandemic. We were able to safely get together in the studio and release an EP during that time with some songs that we had already written and songs that were covers. So we were able to kind of, you know, stoke the fire a little bit.
Lydia Slagle: We released our fourth record, Saturn Return in, I believe, February or March of 2020. Right before everything shut down.
Bill DeVille: Sure, and you weren't able to go out and tour in support of the album.
Lydia Slagle: Yeah.
Bill DeVille: That happened to so many artists, and they totally lost steam because they made a really great record, but they weren't able to bring the show to the people.
Lydia Slagle: Yeah, we were all set to be on a bus for the first time and bring a nanny out because we had little babies. And yeah, just everything shut down. So now we feel like we're playing catch-up with two records to promote, but thankful to be out here nevertheless.
Bill DeVille: One thing I read about the album, this is the first time that you recorded in your — well, the town that you grew up in, Muscle Shoals.
Laura Rogers: Yeah.
Bill DeVille: How is that different, you know, than relocating to, you know, Nashville or wherever else you've made records?
Laura Rogers: I think it was really good for just kind of the sound of the record for me. I mean, when I listen to it, I think it sounds so different than our other records. And I really think that at least for the two of us, we take on kind of a geographical identity in the records that we make, based on where they are. And, you know, I love all of our other records no matter where they were recorded, but there was something really sentimental and kind of full circle that felt like it happened with this record. And of course, being in FAME Studios where Aretha Franklin sang.
Bill DeVille: That was my next question! What's it like recording in a studio that has, let's see, Aretha Franklin Wilson Pickett, Etta James...?
Laura Rogers: Etta James. Paul Simon. I mean, it was just...
Bill DeVille: Jason Isbell.
Laura Rogers: Jason Isbell. I mean, it's so much great music from, you know, the '60s and '70s, but even since then. You can definitely feel kind of an energetic shift, I think, in there. You're just aware of it, you know. What I love about FAME is that it feels like you're walking into a studio in the mid '70s.
Lydia Slagle: They have not changed much of the decor at all.
Laura Rogers: Yeah, the decor is the same, and you see all the pictures on the walls and you can't help but just kind of draw inspiration from that.
Lydia Slagle: Yeah, you're definitely reminded of it all the time, because they had tours coming through. Like twice a day, we would be in the middle of a session, and then a group of 50 people would walk in and we'd have to stop.
Bill DeVille: Could you feel the ghosts and the history in a place like that?
Lydia Slagle: I felt something; I don't know if it was a ghost, but it felt, it felt like a different, like you said, like a shift.
Laura Rogers: Some places are just sacred. They're just sacred. And there's, you know, something really special that happened there. And you just can't help but feel that, that there's like a reverence there when you walk in.
Lydia Slagle: Yeah.
Bill DeVille: I can imagine. And the producer, you worked with John Paul White. What's it like working with John? Of Civil Wars fame, of course.
Lydia Slagle: I mean, he's great. We didn't meet John Paul until probably 2011 or so. But he actually grew up just 10 minutes down the road from us in St. Joe, Tennessee. But yeah, when we, when we got in the studio with him, it just felt like, so comfortable and easy. It's something about working with someone who grew up in the same place as you, the same way. It was just a very easy, an easy relationship in the studio.
Laura Rogers: Yeah, we also worked with Ben Tanner, who, of course, played keys and other instruments for the Alabama Shakes. And so, you know, he's also from our area, and just the combination of those two guys just really kind of pulled us into places I don't think we would have been adventurous enough to go on our own. But they also, one thing that I loved is just as a female, we're not super pushy, females, snd sometimes we have a tendency to kind of just go along with whatever's happening. But they really defaulted to us as kind of the like, the people steering the ship. And it felt really nice to be kind of heard in that way. You know, especially when we were outnumbered by men, you know, and they're wonderful men. And I expected no less.
But it was just very nice to be recognized as kind of like the creator of these songs and the one who knows the best way to translate them in a live show, and the best way to capture what the song is inspired by, and they really catered to that with us. And most of the time, we agreed on where the direction should be, but they were really attentive to what we wanted with this record.
Bill DeVille: Yeah. One thing about Muscle Shoals I always hear, you know, I interviewed Jason Isbell more than once, and we've talked about this before, too, there's seems like a disproportionate amount of excellent musicians in Muscle Shoals. Is there, like, music in schools or something?
Laura Rogers: Oh, actually no.
Lydia Slagle: Not really.
Laura Rogers: That's a trouble spot.
Bill DeVille: I guess it must be church, then, I suppose, huh?
Lydia Slagle: I think it's a culmination of things. I think there are a lot of churches there that contribute to musicality. And, you know, we're kind of in the middle of this great area where there's the Delta Blues that is close by, and then there's Nashville country, and you get so many different kinds of music that are just in this centralized location in Florence. And I think it could be from that. We grew up in a bluegrass family; our dad did bluegrass music every weekend growing up, he still does it today. So we were really surrounded by a lot of gospel and bluegrass just our entire lives. And I think a lot of people in that area were too.
Laura Rogers: Yeah. And there's just — I mean, this may sound disparaging, and I don't mean for it to — but there's not really a lot to do.
Bill DeVille: Yeah.
Laura Rogers: You know, when you're just a kid growing up in the country, you can either get into sports, you know, affiliated with your school, or you can kind of get into music, and other than that...
Lydia Slagle: Or some kind of creative path.
Laura Rogers: Yeah, some creative path, but there aren't really many things like that. And, you know, I think that we both loved music as just kind of a family tradition and pastime, but there never really seemed to be any, like, very strong avenues to make a career out of that. And that's why us having a career in music is still astonishing to the two of us, because we were not, you know, grooming ourselves to be performers or a professional band in any way. It just kind of happened really accidentally and unintentionally. And, you know, it's a shame that there aren't more kind of platforms and opportunities for people in our area, because we are rich with talent. And, you know, we tell people a lot of times that in the early days, when we got, I guess, discovered, we were so shocked that there was any value in what we did, because we're so used to people being good singers who harmonize together. And I'm not joking when I say, "If I took you to our hometown, I could find you a handful of sibling duos who sound as good as we do." And so to us, it was just commonplace. But apparently everywhere outside of that little town in Alabama, it's pretty... It's special and people respond to it. And it still surprises us even after all this time.
Lydia Slagle: Yeah.
Bill DeVille: You know, your story sounds so much like it could have been something that they portrayed in American Idol or something.
Laura Rogers: It felt that way.
Bill DeVille: You kind of missed that era, didn't you? You're a little too early for that.
Lydia Slagle: I think so, yeah!
Laura Rogers: I actually remember at the audition, I remember going in and thinking, "There's got to be some, like, catch to this"; like, I better not sign anything because I might sign away any freedom that I had.
Lydia Slagle: Because even then, that was unheard of. An open audition for a major record label? You didn't hear of things like that happening. So it did seem like a scam to a lot of people.
Laura Rogers: It seemed sketchy. And I was very hesitant. You know, when they started talking about doing a record deal and getting into the studio and recording things, I was thinking, "I'm about to have to sign my life away if I want to do any of these things," but it was not a catch, there was not a catch to it. It was just people who really wanted to do a talent search in our area. And for some reason what we do at home as kids was appealing.
Bill DeVille: Well, let's talk a little bit about the new record Mind, Man, Medicine. We've talked about John Paul White and Ben Tanner, who produced the album. And the first single called "All The Ways," a lovely song. How did you get to Ray LaMontagne?
Lydia Slagle: Ray was actually one of the very first tours that we did in 2010. It was Ray LaMontagne and Levon Helm.
Bill DeVille: Oh, wow!
Lydia Slagle: Which was nuts on its own. But yeah, we just got to know him through that tour. And over the years, he has had us record on things with him, sing with him. We've gone on a lot of tours together by now. And yeah, so we just jokingly, when we were recording that song, we thought it needed something else or some kind of feature. And his name sort of rose to the surface and we, not in a million years, we did not think he would say yes to that, because he keeps to himself.
Bill DeVille: Sure.
Lydia Slagle: So yeah, when he said yes, we were just taken aback and so grateful.
Laura Rogers: We love what he added to it. It's just, you know, if you listen to it, you would think that he was standing in the middle of a studio, in FAME in the 1970s singing, you know, a classic R&B song.
Bill DeVille: He kind of looks like one of those dudes from the '70s, too, doesn't he?
Laura Rogers: It made so much sense. And I can't imagine that song without him on it anymore. It was just a perfect, perfect combo.
Bill DeVille: Well, that's a winner of a song. You know, my other favorite, the one you just performed a little bit ago, "Paperweight."
Laura Rogers: Oh, thank you!
Bill DeVille: It has hints of so many things. I mean, it's got the boom-chicka-boom, Johnny Cash beat a little bit.
Lydia Slagle: Oh, I love that, I love that!
Bill DeVille: And the harmonies and so upbeat, and it makes you feel good. It's a total hit in my world.
Lydia Slagle: Well, thank you!
Laura Rogers: That's the only world that matters!
Bill DeVille: So how did the song come about?
Lydia Slagle: That song I wrote with a girl named Kate York in Nashville. I just went to her house one day, she started strumming her electric guitar, and I had been listening to a lot of, like, '90s Kathy Mattea, like that world.
Bill DeVille: The country hits of the '90s?
Lydia Slagle: Yeah, like, prime country.
Bill DeVille: Yeah, yeah.
Lydia Slagle: And so I was interested in going in that direction. And yeah, we just started talking about how I, myself, am easily persuaded. But my husband has always been this like source of stability for me. He keeps me grounded. And so we just built upon that idea on how someone can really be your paperweight and hold you down. So that's kind of where it came from.
Bill DeVille: It works well.
Lydia Slagle: Thank you.
Bill DeVille: Does the songwriting process always work that way? Or do you sometimes write together?
Lydia Slagle: We mostly write together. I recently have just kind of gotten into writing with other people; we both have. But usually, how it comes about is one of us has an initial idea, a melody or a line, and we build upon that when we get together. We live in different cities, so we just kind of have to trade back and forth. But yeah, that's usually how it goes. Laura is more lyrically driven, I'm more melodically driven. So that usually works in our favor. Yeah.
Bill DeVille: I still remember, it was a few years ago, before the pandemic, you played a few shows at the Minnesota State Fair.
Laura Rogers: Oh yeah we did.
Lydia Slagle: Oh, yeah.
Bill DeVille: Tell us about that experience.
Laura Rogers: That was fun.
Lydia Slagle: It was an experience!
Laura Rogers: I remember — I mean, who doesn't? — this is terrible, but I just remember, like, the food.
Bill DeVille: Yeah, and it's all on a stick. I don't know if that's a national thing.
Laura Rogers: It's so convenient to just walk around, like, double-fisting carnival food!
Bill DeVille: What was your favorite? Do you remember your favorite food?
Lydia Slagle: I know I got a funnel cake that was great.
Laura Rogers: Yeah, there was a funnel cake, and I know I had a corndog, because Southern girl can't resist a corndog.
Bill DeVille: Sure.
Lydia Slagle: I was just taken aback by how big it was.
Laura Rogers: It was so big.
Lydia Slagle: It was massive!
Laura Rogers: It was so big. And I was actually, I remember being really surprised at how many people came to hear us, because, you know, we're not, you know, a typical big headliner, especially at events that are that massive. But that was a funny — and we haven't really done very many fairs, honestly.
Bill DeVille: You ever done like the Texas State Fair?
Lydia Slagle: No, never.
Laura Rogers: Never. Actually—
Bill DeVille: I hear that's the one that's bigger than ours.
Lydia Slagle: Is it?
Bill DeVille: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Laura Rogers: Well, we like yours better!
Bill DeVille: Your harmonies, you know, everybody's talking about artificial intelligence, AI, nowadays. Do you think your harmonies could be replicated by AI?
Lydia Slagle: [Sighs] I don't know, I sure hope not.
Bill DeVille: And your sound in general?
Laura Rogers: I actually have heard some … [laughs] I've heard a friend of mine said that she told some AI program to write a song in the style of the Secret Sisters, and it was remarkably similar; I mean, a lot of the imagery and the way that the words were put together was kind of similar to what we do. But I think what's going to be our saving grace from AI is the fact that people want to be together when they share music, you know? I mean, you may be able to make a beautiful record with AI, but you cannot replicate that live. And the thing is, the records that we feel are the most kind of perfect sounding, are actually not nearly as powerful as the ones that are flawed. And then, you know, we also have people who come to our shows, and they're like, "I love your record, but when I see you in person, it just does something completely different." And I think that that's the one advantage that we have over things like that is that it can't replicate the human connection when two hearts like, share that, that moment together. And, you know, I don't think music should ever be about perfection. And to me, when I listen to AI-generated things, it's entirely too perfect. And it's not human, of course, and I think that's what most people respond to in music is the human element.
I think that the one advantage that we have over [Artificial Intelligence] is that it can't replicate the human connection when two hearts share that moment together. – Laura Rogers of The Secret Sisters
Lydia Slagle: But it is really terrifying.
Laura Rogers: Yeah it is. It's scary. It's something that I think we need to be cautious and concerned about.
Lydia Slagle: And laws in place.
Laura Rogers: I'm sure there's some beneficial aspects to it. But for the creative arts, it's probably detrimental.
Bill DeVille: Well, thanks for restoring my faith.
Laura Rogers: It's hard. You have to hold on to the tiny shred of hope that we still have left. But we just see it every night, you know? We see, and especially coming out of the pandemic and not being able to be together, I mean, we could do you know, Instagram live streams all day long. But when you're in that room, and that energy is being transferred between people who have emotions and experiences, it's just, there's no computer program in the world that can replace that, because it's bigger than computer programs. So I try to hold on to that when I see the dismal news.
Bill DeVille: Laura, Lydia, so nice to have you here.
Laura Rogers: Thank you, Bill. We're glad to be here. We appreciate all the support that you've given us through the years.
Bill DeVille: You bet. The Secret Sisters, and I can't wait for your show tonight. Thanks very much for coming by. We appreciate it.
Lydia Slagle: Thanks a lot, y'all.
Laura Rogers: Thank you.
Songs Performed
00:00:00 If the World Was a House
00:04:06 I Can Never Be Without You Anymore
00:07:35 Paperweight
All songs from The Secret Sisters 2024 album, Mind, Man, Medicine, available on New West Records.
Musicians
Laura Rogers – vocals
Lydia Slagle – guitar, vocals
Credits
Guests – The Secret Sisters
Host – Bill DeVille
Producer – Derrick Stevens
Video – Eric Xu Romani
Audio – Evan Clark
Camera Operators – Eric Xu Romani, Megan Lundberg
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor
External Link
The Secret Sisters – official site