Working from home has its advantages. For singer-songwriter, husband-wife duo The Weepies, a home studio allows for inspiration to strike at any time.
“I know other people get up and go to work, like songwriters and other musicians who will schedule two weeks to go record,” says co-Weepie Steve Tannen. “That’s something we might explore at one point, but that doesn’t seem natural to us or instinctively a good thing to set up two weeks out of your lifetime to capture something. It’s hard to know when you’re going to get an epiphany or a moment that matters.”
One of those magic moments happened as the couple was recording their newest album. Tannen and his wife Deb Talan had a new house and a new baby. Then, news came that Talan had stage 3 breast cancer. Choosing to push through it, the couple continued to play music while working around Talan’s condition, including when she went to record the would-be title track “Sirens.”
“It was a tangible atmosphere that day,” he says. “Deb knew she wanted to do this song that day with the guitar. She was exhausted and had been doing chemo for months. She was ill, and I told her not to go several times. I said, ‘Don’t come up. Go to bed. We don’t need to do this.’ But she was very insistent and fierce.
“She did it, and I was in the room not paying attention to the performance — I was just making sure that she didn’t fall off the chair. Then she finished and said, ‘What do you think?’ and I said I thought it was great — not really wanting to do anything other than get her back to bed.”
Luckily, the one take was enough to produce a slightly rough around the edges, intimate track that captures the vulnerable state of the band.
“I had about enough energy for one take that day, and it felt like it was a good one,” she says. “It ended up being really raw just because I was pretty raw. So in some ways that was taking advantage of the situation for some good creativity.”
Talan was deemed cancer free last year, and now armed with a fresh album and a clean bill of health, The Weepies are hitting the road and heading to Chautauqua on June 13.
Sirens skates the line between light and dark. As Tannen says, the highs are higher, and the lowers are lower. Songs range from the light, breezy “Sunflower,” to heavier, edgier tracks like “River from the Sky.” The album also includes the prophetic song “No Trouble,” with lyrics, “Don’t need no trouble. Sometimes trouble needs me.” — written shortly before Talan’s diagnosis. The duo strived to capture their year in the album, and Tannen says it feels like looking through a scrapbook.
“The album covers a suspended moment of a year,” Tannen says. “The word record comes from the record of an event. This is really a record of a whole year. It was an emotional roller coaster of a year that I’m glad we have finished with.”
The journey has a happy ending, but it wasn’t so clear in the beginning. After being diagnosed, Talan says, there was uncertainty about the future. The band had been working on new music, and they knew they were faced with a big decision.
“I remember feeling like I just wanted to be alive for my kids. I didn’t want them to lose their mom,” she says. “I was hearing about all these other women who had gone through this and had come out strong on the other end, so I felt like this was going to be hard, but not fatal…
“Steve asked me, ‘Well what do you want to do? Do you want to go to Baja on the weekends or take a few weeks off? And I was like, ‘I want to keep doing what we’re doing. I love our life, and I want to keep working on this record as long as I can.’ There was something very life affirming about that,” she says.
That drive is something that has always been a part of the band since their start.
“We’re always working, I think part of that is who we are,” Tannen says. “We’re slightly OCD. We’re workaholics, but it doesn’t feel like work. … That’s just what we do. That’s how we interact with the world.”
The couple has been making music since the night they met in 2001. They each started as solo acts and were both fans of each other’s music. Eventually the two crossed paths, and their musical chemistry was undeniable — as was their personal connection, eventually marrying in 2007. She was a little bit folksy, and he was a little bit rock ’n’ roll, Tannen says, and when they started playing together, they were unsure if people would like their sound. But after a few successful shows, they knew they were onto something, which continues to this day.
“The way we make music together has remained essentially unchanged since the night we met,” Tannen says. “We both act as gunslingers trying to outdo each other, but we’re admirers of each other as well. And sometimes I just put down the guitar and say, ‘You win, great job!’ The music helps our relationship — there’s nowhere to hide. … It gets to a pretty honest place really quick. It all just comes out in the music, and that’s useful in any relationship, to get that stuff all on the table.”
Talking about their struggles was an important part of making their latest record. And while their songwriting style hasn’t changed, the headspace for this album was gloomier than their previous work.
“Be My Thrill [2010] was really fun, — everyone’s healthy, riding a high of where we were,” he says. “We had a fantastically successful two years. It was just fun. [Sirens] was not that. This was us just trying to work and stay alive, and then at the end of it we had this record of that event. It’s definitely a picture book, which I’m happy to go back to sometimes. But it’s much easier to look at Say I Am [2006] where we were falling in love or Hideaway [2008] where we were adjusting to being adults. This album was survival.”
Tannen and Talan both say they avoid writing too literally — never consciously sitting down to write a song about something specific like battling cancer — but, unsurprisingly, darkness creeps in on Sirens. Each song on the 16-track album is a slice of their life during that period, providing a multi-layered story.
“‘River from the Sky’ was the closest to letting the unconscious write about what we were going through, because it was dreadful,” he says. “‘Never Let You Down’ shows another angle of that same moment where I’m saying, ‘This is my life. I love her. I’m not going anywhere, I’m fine. This is fine.’ … Without just saying here was our year, there’s all these different angles. And together, I hope it gives you an emotional picture that feels true.”
The album served as a lifeline for the family — a focus on creation and not death. While Talan was limited by her strength and energy level, she says it was an escape to work on music.
“It became like a stepping stone through what felt like the opposite of life. It was at least some sort of healing from illness,” Talen says. “It just felt good to get into the studio. … It felt like, ‘Yeah, we’re not just having cancer right now, we’re also making a good year, raising our boys and keeping a lot of life around.’ That was really good and helpful.”
Intertwined in Sirens are threads of happiness and hope, among the fabric of hardship. After their time at home, the couple is excited to get back on the road and say hello to the world.
“I’ve been loving taking these songs out and playing them for people,” Talan says. “It doesn’t feel like a dark album, and it doesn’t feel like a dark experience to play them. It feels very positive. Both Steve and I as people and writers have a sort of darker melancholy that’s always there, but there’s also a joy there too. I think we both approach life trying to see everything that’s there, and writing is the same way. So often times a song that may seem dark on the surface will have some positive thing in it. We both like that.”
ON THE BILL: The Weepies. 8 p.m. Saturday, June 13. Chautauqua Auditorium, 900 Baseline Road, Boulder, 303-442-3282.
