The Rosebuds might have broken up, but they've also broken through

If anything, my conversation with Kelly Crisp confirmed the whole “birds of a feather” thing for me. As part of The Rosebuds, along with bandmate Ivan Howard, she’s also been a part of a looser group of Raleigh based musicians who have honed their craft for the last several years only to hit the mainstream all around the same general time. Names like Bon Iver, Bowerbirds, Megafaun and more are a part of the network, and after you listen to Loud Planes Fly Low, you’ll be anxious to add The Rosebuds to that list — if they weren’t already there.

But this is a new day for The Rosebuds. The relationship between Howard and Crisp fell apart, but somehow they managed to stay together and create their best work yet, something that Crisp says only came when they finally became honest with each other through the songs they were writing. In fact, she says some things to Howard only through the music and that’s what makes Loud Planes a piece of true beauty — honest, vulnerable, emotional, essential. The Rosebuds might have broken up but they’ve also broken through.

SSv: The news just dropped about the tour with Bon Iver, but I’m curious how something like that comes together?

Kelly Crisp: We’ve just been talking about it. Justin e-mailed us, because we are friends and Ivan, the other singer in the Rosebuds, was in Gayngs with Justin. But we’ve been friends for years before that. But we just talked about it like, ‘Do you guys want to do it?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Do you?’ ‘Yep.’ It was that simple. [Laughs] He said that’d be great, so we worked it out from there.

So it was worked out between us first. It wasn’t one of those things where I heard it from my booking agent that we won the account or something like that. It was a friendly invitation he extended to us and we’re just lucky that he likes our band. [Laughs]

SSv: What’s the history there?

Kelly: He produced our record Night of the Furies. He lived in Raleigh and I’ve lived here for a long time. When he moved to North Carolina, he lived with us for a little while. Ivan and I lived in a little house and Justin moved in with us to make the record. We just did it at the house mostly. So we go back quite a bit, because that was in 2007.

Then he did some touring with us and then went and recorded his demos that he had, which were For Emma. I guess I got to listen to those demos, which was really awesome. [Laughs] Then that’s it. We’ve just been friends since then. He was in a band in Raleigh called DeYarmond Edison, and that band split up and became Bon Iver and Megafaun.

I would say Megafaun, The Rosebuds, Bon Iver and Bowerbirds are friends from our group who have all stayed tight over the years. So it’s funny that all of these bands are hitting all at once. Bon Iver is obviously quite huge and he really deserves it, because he’s just incredible. But also, we’ve been working really hard. Bowerbirds and Megafaun are amazing. Megafaun is set to release a beautiful record. I haven’t heard the new Bowerbirds, but I heard the songs are coming along really nicely. I can’t wait to hear that record. But this fall, we will all have records out, so we’ve stayed tight and productive.

SSv: The tour begins on your home turf, so that has to be a nice way to kick things off. How does that change as you move throughout the country?

Kelly: We have a lot of friends in our hometown, so they all come to the shows. It’s a bit more fun to play that hometown show, because we can all hang out afterwards and we don’t have to drive eight hours to the next show. We can just visit and hang. It’s always good to do that when you have friends in a town. We are going to kick off the tour here in Wilmington and Raleigh, and that’s going to be fun because it will feel like we’re home.

Also, half of the people in the audience are also musicians, so that’s kind of intimidating. [Laughs]  We live in this big music community. I’m not sure if you know it or not, but Raleigh and Durham and Chapel Hill are all big music towns, but right now it feels like my little group of friends are now in these touring bands. They’ve been working so hard over these years and things are finally coming together in a way that we can do this as a job for real.

SSv: Obviously, I want to jump to the album and discuss the new material. Everything I’m reading is about the relationship ending with you and Ivan and yet you still continue together and that comprises the material here. I’d love to hear about this from your perspective, and did you ever think of just setting the whole thing aside?

Kelly: [Pause] Yeah, I’m meandering around even trying to answer that, because I’m not articulate about it yet. What we felt like recording this record was that we were trying to maintain this disguise. It was like we didn’t want to talk about our personal lives. But how can you write a good record that feels honest if you’re trying to not acknowledge the biggest thing that you need to talk about, as two creative individuals? But because the relationship was between us, it was hard to talk about.

I feel like we probably tried to avoid writing about the relationship in the beginning for sure. Then once we lost that fear, everything became much more honest. Then we felt like we were making really good music. It was the first time we had actually made very honest music that was about us personally and emotionally inside.

SSv: Do you remember what the catalyst was for losing that fear?

Kelly: Yeah, I’d have to talk to Ivan about this to see if it was his experience, too, but we definitely realized while playing things for each other like, ‘Hey, I have this demo that I think you should do this on.’ It was hard. But it was when we actually sat down and started playing together after living in separate towns that things started getting better.

SSv: When you begin to open up, what do you find yourself able to do that you haven’t done before?

Kelly: Personally and I think for Ivan, too, we just have so much more courage about songwriting now. It’s weird, because we’ve been in this band for awhile and each record is different. We keep ourselves entertained. But this is our first record where… I think we should change the band name or at least title this record The Rosebuds, because we felt this was the first real record of our new lives.

So what changed for us is that we felt like we were unfocused, like we didn’t know what was going on in our world emotionally. Every day, I was just so confused about so many things. Then to hear him say things to me in a song or to hear my ideas repeated back to me or even me to speak to him through the songs was so important. It made us so grounded.

All of the confusion that was an everyday lifestyle was gone. We just had this new reality of being very present in our thoughts and on the same page with each other creatively. It created this climate where we could do be so ferociously creative with each other. We could really work together on the song versus each of us trying to bring our own ideas into a song. We were both active within the entire process of the song.

SSv: Were there things you were saying to Ivan for the first time through music?

Kelly: Well, if you listen to the music, you can tell it’s very personal and heavy. There are things that clearly must have been difficult to say in normal conversation, yet because you have this vehicle, we are luckier than others who go through this and don’t have this alternative expression for their feelings.

Most couples have this degree of confusion where things aren’t in complete focus. Your perspective has shifted if a person loses a relationship. It’s how older people become confused when their spouse dies. You lose perspective when you’re so used to sharing all of our time with someone, so being able to communicate those really heavy ideas to each other is an experience that most people don’t have.

SSv: A healing experience?

Kelly: Definitely. You can’t believe it. It’s just incredible. It’s totally incredible. It transformed my life.

SSv: Can you explain that — how it transforms the life?

Kelly: My entire school of thought changed. Any animosity I had been holding onto about myself or things I should have said. Nothing matter anymore. I was just inside of myself again. We were working together creatively again. So it’s like two people who are trying to speak to each other and you’re in a foreign place and you can’t speak the same language realizing that you have a language in common.

SSv: Were there some aspects that you questioned releasing to the masses?

Kelly: It didn’t matter anymore. We didn’t care. I thought it was inappropriate in the beginning, because we didn’t even want to approach the subject. We were writing about different things and keep things impersonal. Everything would be obscured by the metaphor. We felt we had to be poetic to serve as a mask. But once we broke through to not caring about that, things became more beautiful as they became concrete. We just had a confidence in being honest with each other, and that’s okay because there is an inherent beauty to how devastatingly honest we were being with each other.