Husband and wife musical duo UTAH CAROL, share a life, the stage and a bittersweet musical sensibility
By Lauren Vislocky
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Grant Birkenbeuel and JinJa Davis are Utah Carol |
Utah Carol, a husband and wife band taking its name from the cowboy song "Utah Carol," consists of Grant Birkenbeuel and JinJa Davis. Since their beginning ten years ago, Utah Carol has received an adoring response from their audience and have had continued success as they recently released their third album. Though the work for the album is done solely by Birkenbeuel and Davis, they have still been able to garner great attention as well as placing music in films such as All the Real Girls and the upcoming Kabluey. Utah Carol recently talked to Playback about their craft.
What's it like working together as husband and wife? Are there any challenges that make it difficult at times?
Jinja: Grant and I have been working together a long time at Utah Carol and there are advantages because we have a similar aesthetic and we are not as hesitant to express our opinions about ways we're working on music or ideas we have about songs. The biggest disadvantage we have is we never get away from each other. There are times that we have gigantic creative fights and I think the fighting between us might be more intense because we are married and it's hard sometimes to separate our relationship from our professional working relationship.
How did you meet and come to start working together?
Jinja: We met in college but it wasn't until after we got married that Grant was writing songs on his guitar and and I would pipe in on some of the songs he was working on. I started playing bass and I realized quickly that I couldn't write songs on bass. So, I decided to pick up the guitar and Grant's a guitar player, and I thought, well, this is great. We started playing around a little bit together with music. I took a songwriting class at a music school here in Chicago called The Old Town School of Folk Music with a teacher named Ralph Colbert. He was very encouraging and I wrote a few songs and I took them home to Grant and I would say "Grant, you're the guitar player, how about we go sing these songs on stage at this club in Chicago" and we went and performed a song. I looked at Grant and I said "this is great, we need to do this some more." We got a great response from the audience and at that point started writing together.
Do you think it's rewarding to do all the work on your own?
Jinja: I definitely think it's rewarding when you see some success. I think that in the beginning, because we had such a tremendous response to our music, it's been much more satisfying. The satisfaction of working hard and doing all this work and seeing the fruits of your labor that is a product because of the hard work you've done on your own as opposed to having an organization behind you making it happen. Even though we do this all independently, if someone reached out to us and said they wanted to help us, we would take the help. I feel like if we only had to focus on the music all the time then we would be putting out a lot more records but it feels good when you've had some success.
What are you going to be working on in the future?
Jinja: We are starting to have little tickles in our brain for our next album. We just recently did a licensing deal with MTV and sent records out to other music supervisors. We're getting good responses but nobody's taken a bite yet and I think our biggest goal is we're really trying to find people to cover our songs. We're trying to find friendly ears to cover our songs because we would like to be songwriters not only for ourselves but write songs for other people. We want to make a longterm career so that's really what our long-term goals are, to continue to do that kind of music and to keep making music.
