When I met Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Meath behind Little Stage on the Prairie, Alexandra was writing down the lyrics to a Charlie Feathers song, and they both excused Molly Sarle, who was off relaxing on a magnetized mat. So the three of us went for a short walk away from the festival, mostly talking about fantasy novels and science fiction.
Stylus: In your career, how long have you been touring for?
Alexandra Sauser-Monnig: We started two years ago, but we’re not one of those bands that tours six months of the year.
Stylus: And how long were you playing shows for before you started touring?
Amelia Meath: I think we had three shows before we started touring. I booked an east coast tour for us—two weeks long. It was really hard, but we did it. We toured in my Prius.
ASM: We played a show in a field, we played a show in a weird coffee shop, we played in houses and backyards and porches and all sorts. For our friends, mostly.
Stylus: And what keeps you grounded while touring?
AM: Reading.
Stylus: Reading what?
AM: All sorts of things, usually series of the science fiction variety. I have reread the entire Narnia series, all of A Wrinkle in Time, right now I’m reading The Hunger Games. Usually for younger people, and I read all the Harry Potters, again. And a lot of books on Mayans. Not about the end of the world–there’s this guy named Martin Prechtel, and he writes beautiful books about tribal life.
Stylus: And Alex, what keeps you grounded during touring?
ASM: I too, like to have books to read, and I read a whole bunch of—my mom and my step-dad are major science fiction nerds, as Amelia can attest, because we have every season of Star Trek Enterprise, but she also has a huge collection of Anne McCaffrey books, about dragons on this imaginary planet called Pern, so I read those, and also Harry Potter, and I’m reading The Three Musketeers. But the most important things for me to do is to take baths before going to bed, and focus on deep breathing.
Stylus: I was interested to read that one of you has a degree in literature [Alexandra], one of you studied performance and theatre [Amelia], and one took performance and gender [Molly]. I was wondering how you think of your band in relation to your studies?
ASM: I’m my most productive songwriter when I’m also doing a lot of other things at the same time, like if I’m working on a lot of drawings or prints, or reading a lot. I find it pretty crucial to be inspired by other things I’m being exposed to in my life in order to really feel the urge to write songs.
AM: I completely agree. In order to have an output, you need to have a lot of input. I mean theatre is different—Mountain Man is different because it’s not a theatrical event, or more most of the time we’re trying to be as honest as possible, which means being Molly, Alex, and Amelia. So it’s good acting training.
Stylus: But you could you forego that—you could portray a character, like, say, Lady Gaga does. But that isn’t your thing?
ASM: I don’t want to be covered in meat.
AM: It wasn’t the original intention with which we intended to write these songs. Particularly the material is so intimate, what we’re singing about is so intimate, I find the material translates more easily when you’re being a human, and not a character… Or as little as a character as you can be, even though we all put on characters all the time. You know what I mean.
Stylus: What inspired you to sing in the Appalachian style—
ASM: I actually object to being cast in the light of “Appalachian” because none of us are Appalachian, and we sing a wide variety of songs. I think people pick up on the songs that we sing that are of that style of music, like “Fair and Tender Ladies,” and “Bright Morning Stars are Rising.” I mean, we also sing a lot of other songs. We sing a song called “Holy Father” by a girl who calls herself tooth ache, and it’s, [turns to Amelia] what? It’s got a lot of beats—
AM: It’s electronic.
ASM: I think a lot of people pick up on that, because they can identify it, and then describe us as Appalachian because I think in some ways it’s hard to define what we’re doing.
AM: Particularly because we don’t sound Appalachian. We use harmony, but we don’t swing in the way that Appalachian music does, I don’t think. Our stuff is much more sparse, and so I think somewhere along the lines, someone decided that we were Appalachian, and it stuck, which is unfortunate. For example, Molly and I have a side project band, called BOBBY, which is either Molly or I singing with five dudes. Because there were members of Mountain Man in it, they called the band folk in some of the first reviews of us–and it’s not, it’s electronic, there’s at least seven synths on stage. But because we’re in it, it’s folk music. I think that genres get very confused very quickly.