What if you’re both…
“It’s never happened yet,” Laurie says.
Cary chuckles. “It’s time for a drink. But that happens.”
In the end, the musical partnership between Cary Hudson and Laurie Stirratt outlasted their marriage. This is still a delicate matter, and an impossible choice. “I don’t think we’re really quite ready to talk about it,” Laurie says, tentatively, for this is possibly the first time they’ve been asked to do so in public. “All I can say is that it works really well.”
They exchange glances.
“We were friends, before,” she continues. “We always just clicked musically, and it was a chemistry thing, with the music, that I know that we can’t take for granted. And I know that I would have a really hard time, if ever, being able to find somebody else that I enjoyed playing with as much. When you’ve played with somebody for 12 years, you know what they’re going to do, it’s like reading minds onstage, and that’s very important to both of us.”
Cary looks over at her for another second, then nods. “See, we were in a band for two years, driving around in a van playing music together, before we started swapping spit and all that stuff. So we had that going on. And I think every real band starts out living together, like the Rolling Stones. Mick and Keith don’t live together anymore, you know.
“I think every band’s like that. They get divorced at some point. You’ve got some good examples out there to follow, you know. A lot of people have pulled it off.”
Still, writing the next Blue Mountain album — and they hope to have it out by the end of 2001 — will take a little more scheduling than it might have before. Cary still lives in Oxford, sharing a pack of seven dogs with his neighbor, but Laurie has moved north to Nashville. “Oxford’s so great, and I consider it my home,” she says. “But I really started to feel isolated as far as the business side of things went, and I started to feel like maybe the band was suffering.
“Honestly, Cary and I really did remove ourselves from a lot of the business stuff for a while, which was not necessarily a good thing. If you’re a musician, you always just want this dream situation where somebody else takes care of your business and all you have to do is write songs. But it doesn’t work that way in reality.
“So I moved up here. I thought it would be a good thing for us musically, just trying to make some connections. You don’t have to be a whore about it, but if you want to be a part of the industry, you do kinda have to be part of the industry, you know?”
A few days after Thanksgiving, Blue Mountain takes the stage at Nashville’s 12th & Porter, with Coutch on drums. Soon enough Cary is lost to the songs, his fingers cutting nimble figures across the fretboard, his voice sometimes abandoning words in favor of more articulate yelps of joy.
It is Laurie who conducts the band’s business from the stage, selling CDs and T-shirts, promising a website in a couple months. She does not lose herself so easily in the music, and then a smile traces itself upon her lips, and their shoulders touch, and something passes between them that cannot otherwise be seen, nor touched, nor wholly understood.
There is not a lot of room to hide driving down the highway in a van with your ex-spouse and a drummer, nor in the trusting room where you gather to do the hard work of writing songs, nor onstage, where your music pours its emotion onto the night.
Muses make harsh mistresses.
They’re worth it, mostly.
No Depression co-editor Grant Alden lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his patient wife, Susan Thomas, and two very impatient tortoiseshell kittens.
