Charleston, South Carolina’s husband-and-wife duo Shovels & Rope played the Alabama Music Box in downtown Mobile on February 18, 2014 — a 7 p.m. show with $18 door tickets and rising singer-songwriter Shakey Graves on opening duty.
For anyone who hadn’t yet caught the pair live, the pitch was simple: this is a band built for small rooms. Cary Ann Hearst’s soaring vocals and pounding percussion lock in with Michael Trent’s guitar work and backing harmonies, and as true multi-instrumentalists the two trade instruments from song to song, producing a sound far bigger than a two-person act has any right to make.
Songs of the Southeast
The duo writes what it knows — songs steeped in the Southeast, like their 2013 track “Birmingham.” By early 2014 they had two albums to their name, “Shovels & Rope” (2008) and the breakthrough “O’ Be Joyful” (2012), and had just begun work on a third record that January while lining up a heavy February-through-April tour weighted toward Southern stops.
Gulf Coast audiences already had a reference point: Shovels & Rope turned heads at Forecastle Festival 2013, holding a main-stage crowd in Louisville in broad daylight. The Mobile date promised the same performance scaled down to an intimate club setting.
With Shakey Graves warming up the room and tickets held to eighteen dollars, the Music Box landed one of the stronger Americana bookings of the winter — the kind of night that reminded Mobilians why the Dauphin Street venue kept its calendar worth watching.