By Eliza Berkon
Folk-pop duo The Weepies are letting the melodies speak for themselves on their Completely Acoustic and Alone Tour, arriving at the State Theatre Dec. 14. After fronting a 15-piece band for their tour behind their 2015 album, Sirens, the group has pared itself back down to its core members, Deb Talan and Steve Tannen, a few guitars and a couple of mics.
Talan and Tannen were solo performers in their own right before joining forces—and later marrying—in the early 2000s. Five albums and three children later, The Weepies are an Iowa-based group with an international audience and tracks that frequently pop up in movie and TV soundtracks and commercials. We connected with Tannen, who spoke to us from his family’s minivan en route to the band’s next performance.
What inspired your current tour, and why did you choose to go all-acoustic?
When Deb got through and recovered from stage 3 cancer [in 2014], we felt like we had to have a party, and we invited everybody. We ended up with 15 people on a bus with a big band tour. Toward the end of that tour, we both started feeling kind of numb and a little bit removed from what we were doing. When we got back after the tour, we started playing just the two of us with our guitars and started playing little shows. And they felt like life; it felt like what we got into this for in the first place.
What music should we expect to hear?
The set list changes every night. We have more than 50 songs we are drawing from at the moment: older songs, songs from Deb’s solo records, brand-new songs, songs from Deb’s new solo record [Lucky Girl, expected early 2017], as well as some of the Weepies ones we usually play.
Tell me about your songwriting process when you’re working together.
Both of us are obsessive-compulsive writers who scribble all the time, just ideas. And we bring things to the table, play them for each other. One of us might drag a song back to his or her cave. But in general, it was always community-workshop writing where you just throw stuff on there, and there’s no wrong answer—even though we’re both pretty harsh. But it doesn’t feel personally harsh. It’s just about getting the song right.
That has to be a challenge to be married to a musician with whom you work.
It’s much less of a challenge than I’m making it out to be. It’s so organic, and I think that anyone in a long-term relationship of any kind probably understands how the rivers sort of fork on their own and are just as strong. A band and a songwriting collaboration is a marriage, and then a marriage is also a marriage. So we have a bunch of those happening.
Tell me about your recording process. I know for your 2015 album, Sirens, you had a number of musicians record remotely.
I think that the one thing The Weepies have never done is get the whole band in one place at one time and just get a take. And that’s why the live shows are exciting for us: That show is never gonna be repeated. It is what it is on stage.
When you were working on that album, Deb was undergoing treatment for cancer. Can you talk a bit about the role the album played for you at that time?
I think one of the profound things that happened during treatment was that Deb and I looked at each other and said, “What do we want to do with our lives?” And the answer is pretty much this: We want to raise our kids and make music. And so we did. And I think Deb’s focus on the writing and recording—I can’t speak for her, but it probably helped Deb. And as caretaker, and as sort of Scotch-taper of our whole lives at the time, it definitely helped me to have a focus that wasn’t an illness.
With three children, whom you have home-schooled, how do you balance career and family?
Not very well. It’s incongruous and hilarious. And the kids both don’t like it because it’s time away from them and they love it ’cause it’s special and it’s music and it’s cool. For us, I think a lot of our choices weren’t really choices. Both of us tried to do other careers for a long time and failed. And then once we had kids, we just took them along. It seems natural.
Are you working on a new album?
There is at the moment a very Steve-heavy group of songs because Deb has been working on her solo record. I believe that after this tour, we’re probably gonna have the mojo to get back in as The Weepies.
