Tulsa-based duo Desi & Cody are releasing their self-titled debut album August 25th.
Garrett Cash: How did you guys get together?
Desi: I first met Cody when I was in college. I was listening to the college radio station and I heard him on there, and I thought it was recording, but it turned out to be live. I thought “Oh my gosh, he’s amazing, I’ve got to go see this guy.” So I went to his show, and at the time he had a full band called “Cody Clinton and the Bishop.” We became friends, and eventually ended up dating. Time went by, we started lived together, and during that time his band got hired on to play with the Leon Russell band. So Cody had kind of had it with having a band, saying that he was going to go on and do his own thing. He didn’t want to start over constantly, so he went ahead and started a solo project. I guess he was in the middle of recording his first EP, and he says he heard me singing in the shower. (Laughs)
Cody: That’s right, I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
That’s a great game!
Cody: It is a great game. I think I was struggling with the water temple when I heard her singing. I was like “What is that? That’s amazing!” She was singing hardcore, super crazy high opera type stuff. I was like “Woah.” Then she started singing some Disney songs or something. I think that’s how she started out. Singing along with Cinderella and things like that. And when you see her around with animals, she really is like a Disney princess. She starts singing and all the animals start coming in our kitchen and birds land on her shoulder. (Laughs)
Desi: Not true! They do not! (Laughs)
Cody: But yeah, I feel like half the time she sings it’s some Disney song or old show tune or something. Meet Me in St. Louis kind of stuff.
Desi: Right, it wasn’t just Disney princesses, I grew up wanting to be Judy Garland and Doris Day. Billie Holiday. Classic beautiful voices. Anyway, sorry to get off topic, but yes, he basically said he heard me in the shower and now he wants me to singing background vocals on his new EP. And soon enough he wants me singing live with him because people want to hear the voice on the record, and I was very uncomfortable with that! And then people ended up giving us gig offers and opportunities and we figured people must like it. So that’s how “Desi and Cody” started!
Cody: She’s right, it definitely wasn’t planned. We had been dating for two years before we ever started singing together. And then when I made the solo EP I just made it because I wanted to do something. I didn’t have a lot of expectations about becoming a solo artist or anything. We started out playing gigs in restaurants for free food, fun, and all that stuff. We made something like $75 bucks a night just for fun, but pretty soon people are showing up to hear us at the restaurants in droves, which hadn’t happened before, and I figured it was probably Desi’s singing.
Cody, what was your musical background like growing up?
Cody: When I was a little kid my Dad was a guitar player in the seventies and my Mom and him sang together, believe it or not, and he didn’t sing as much, but my Mom sang. I grew up on The Beatles, the big one in my family. My Dad would quiz us on them at the dinner table. “Who played that guitar solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps?” And we’d be like “Uh.. Eric Clapton!” And he’d say “Right!” So it was all stuff like that, and The Allman Brothers, ZZ Top, guitar stuff. Then when I was like 10, 11, 12, I didn’t fit in at any of the groups at school. But then the grunge thing happened and I thought “Hmm, that’s neat.” And that’s when I started getting into playing music. Kurt Cobain/Nirvana, Soundgarden, etc. That’s a big part of my musical background, honestly. I would play every Nirvana song, every grunge rock song, you know, To back up a little, when I was ten, eleven, twelve I was in a Southern Baptist church. A lot like in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. That was part of it too. I’ll Fly Away. That country, folky, bluegrass gospel kind of stuff. I learned all those songs too and I grew up singing them. Then I was introduced to marijuana when I was fifteen or sixteen and all of a sudden it became, like, The Doors and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, stuff like that. And finally when I got older I got back into bluegrass, I met up with a lot of bluegrass musicians and learned to reevaluate my roots. I started playing that a lot more again. Now it’s kind of all come full circle and I’m playing it all at once. Folk, bluegrass, 60’s rock, and a little bit of Beatles 60’s pop sort of stuff all rolled together I think. It comes from all that. I grew up on a lot of Roy Orbison and The Everly Brothers too. I’ve always loved and been obsessed with The Beatles, but in the last five or six years I’ve been like “Oh my gosh, this is where The Beatles got all the stuff they did. Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, etc.” Not only that, but for singing harmonies The Everly Brothers are the place to go. Gram Parsons recently got introduced to me by steel player buddy of mine, who told me about him after I asked about his psychedelic country steel playing. He told me about The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. You know, you gotta get that album.
I feel like I heard a lot of Gram on one of the album’s tracks: This Mornin’. That psych-country sound you were talking about.
Desi: That’s my favorite track on the album!
It should be a single!
Cody: I honestly don’t even know what a single is anymore. When I write, I write, like fifty songs. If I want ten on the record. Then I’ll send it to our drummer and some of the other guys and friends and whoever, and I’ll let them tell me what songs to put on the record. But oftentimes the ones people love are surprising to me. Like “Well, ok then!” You never know.
What’s your approach when you write songs?
Cody: Oh my gosh, it’s like trying to make yourself a lightning rod and you hope you get struck by lightning. Thank God for giving me the lightning strike, it’s not a premeditated thing. It’s like fishing too. You never know if you’re going to catch anything that day or not. My process is basically just sitting down with a guitar and letting myself play stuff while I sing gibberish. Then I’ll go back and listen to it and see if anything grabs my attention. I’ll take the scratch material and try to piece it together into a song. Then I’ll grab catch phrases and write around them.
Who do you use as your bouncing board for song ideas, does Desi help in that?
Cody: Yes, and also, she’s been contributing more and more as a songwriter. She actually helped me write a Christmas song you can find online. On a country Christmas compilation, a Patsy Cline sort of thing. One of my favorite things we’ve written, actually. “Black Box Christmas Desi and Cody” on Google and you should find it. It’s a funny, 50’s Christmas sort of thing. But yes, she helped me write that and she’s been helping me come up with melodies and ideas.
Desi: You know, I didn’t really have musical knowledge, like, I didn’t build on any musical knowledge. So I feel like throughout the last couple of years my brain has been really been waking up to music, like harmonies. I think the first song we tried doing together was either Teach Your Children or Sounds of Silence. I cried, because I just couldn’t hear it. It’s funny how now it’s become a part of what I can do. I actually hear a melody, or I can write with you. We should go light or dark on this song. Things like that. That’s been something coming out little by little.
Cody: I feel like on our next record we’ll at least have a solid two or three, three or four “Desi & Cody” written together kind of songs. And then hopefully it grows from there. What I do is I’ll listen to her talk and see what she says about a subject and I’ll remember things she said or ideas she tried to portray. And use those in the lyrics of the song. So it is her singing about something she’s passionate about or came from her mind or whatever.
Desi: I know he’s done that before, but with this last album I really wasn’t a part of the writing until we got into the studio. That’s where I started making some suggestions. That’s where I started to feel comfortable. For most of the writing process I was up in Oregon because my father had passed away. I went up there, and when I came back Cody had all these songs and it was crazy, because I remember sitting down and hearing some of the tracks, and crying. Asking, “How did you know that this is exactly what I would have said to my Dad?” I don’t know how he did it.
Cody: Yeah when I knew she was gone to Oregon for her father’s funeral I couldn’t go, couldn’t afford to fly and there was no time for driving. But she needed to get there. So I was really upset, but I had only met her father once. My father at the same time was really ill, it was less than a year or a little over a year before he would pass away. So I wrote This Mornin’, Unfamiliar Road, and the bonus track Everyone’s On Our Side in the week or so that she was gone for her father’s funeral.
And you’ve said before that this album was very personal and that you felt like it was cathartic to release it. Was there any specific songs that did that for you in that way?
Cody: Yeah, those three are probably the most.. and oh yeah I wrote Second Wind then as well. Those are all the closest to home on the record. Everything on there is personal, because that’s how songwriting is. But songs like Back In My Arms are kind of an attempt to lighten up the mood a bit. But they’re all a part of the story. Pull each other up out of the shit and all that.
You guys were able to raise about $15,000 or so on Kickstarter to help finish the record, what was it like to crowdfund?
Desi: Oh my gosh, it was insane.
Cody: It was amazing and overwhelmingly humbling.
Desi: I was shocked. I was working at a coffee shop, sort of thinking “Yeah, we play music.. but lots of people play music so I’ll just let that be a hobby.” And then this came along, and it was a lot to ask, so we’ve really got to throw ourselves into this. And that last day I remember seeing it go, well, I can’t remember what number it was, but every time I walked through the office it would just go up and up and up. And I finally realized “There’s people who believe in what we’re doing!” This many people believe in us and are willing to give us money not even knowing what product they’re going to get. They didn’t even know if the record was going to be any good. So I thought, “Well, if this many people believe in me, I should believe in me.” That being said, it was crazy. Because we were planning the wedding, we were touring, going to new places, getting strangers to sign up for a new Amazon account!
Cody: Yeah, logistically it was a pain in the ass. My father passed away around the time we promised to get everything out, so it took way longer to get everything to everyone. So I felt horrible about that. But I had a total break down, which I had never had, so it was weird. But I’m very grateful for the Kickstarter thing, and the other thing it does whenever you do a Kickstarter is that you almost feel bad or guilty about it. You feel like “Ahh I just don’t want to do this again, I don’t feel comfortable with it.”
Desi: Asking people for money is just odd anyway.
Cody: It’s just a pride thing I guess. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money. My Dad was a steelworker, and eventually we became middle class but growing up we were really poor. I just feel real weird about asking for money. It probably comes from that.
I think it was good that the people got to pay for what they wanted to hear, and that it ended being such a superb final product.
Cody: Yeah, and if we hadn’t gotten the money for the mix and master (which was super-pro), I don’t think it would have been as good. That stuff is so crucial. The mix and master can make or break the record.
Desi: And that was part of the reason why we were raising that amount of money, because we knew we didn’t want to release something, well, for lack of a better word (and excuse my French), half-assed.
Cody: We had worked so hard tracking the record that we thought: “Well, why would we want to cut corners on the mix and master when that’s so important?”
Speaking of tracking the record, what was that experience like? How did you work with the musicians on the album?
Cody: We started out with a tape machine in my house, we had this half inch eight track, a board, and borrowed gear from Black Box studios. We were in my house with dogs, and the tape machine, and dudes all living on the floor out in the country. And we had just moved in!
Desi: We have a knack for doing things at the worst time possible.
Cody: It was crazy. Our board didn’t work!
Desi: The board took five grown men struggling to get it into the house! It was so big and so heavy, it took up half of our bedroom, and it didn’t even work!
Cody: We started recording and figured it out, we laid down drums and bass, and then our tape machine started changing speeds at some point in the recording without us noticing and so everything we recorded for the most part was trashed. But I just heard there was actually about four or five songs that we did that we can release later that actually turned out. That might be something we release in the next year or two to keep people interested in what we’re doing. But overall it felt like a huge failure. We spent a lot of money on tape, it didn’t work..
Desi: I had taken off of work, we were all broke..
Cody: But the cool thing was that we developed the songs as a band. Sort of structurally and groove wise. It was better than sending tracks to dudes I had never met. And then we got back together at the church, we tracked drums, it was great. And then we tracked acoustic guitar and vocals. The vocals didn’t go well because it was winter, and we were freezing and cold.
Desi: You’re trying to hold your body tense and drink hot tea and you can’t really relax.
Cody: So anyway, I taped the drums and we went home. And in my home studio pretty much recorded 80% of the record you hear at home. The guitar, the bass, all the instruments you hear in the background. Vocals, which was great to do at home, even though I drove myself a bit mad in the studio. I hate my voice. And anytime, especially when you’re producing yourself, I just beat myself up way too much for my voice. And then I’m comparing myself to Desi, who is nearly perfect..
Desi: Oh please…
Cody: It’s true! She is almost never off pitch! I struggle, because singing does not come naturally to me.
Desi: He was like “Sing a song!” and it’s four in the morning and I’ve got to open the coffee shop, and I’m just laying there screaming at the microphone.. “Why can’t I sing?!?!” It got to the point where I had to put tape on the door and tell him he was not allowed to enter that day.
Cody: I would rip it off the door and go in there… the only thing I didn’t have was little bottles to pee in like Howard Hughes. But finally we recorded everything, and everything except the vocals was pretty stress-free and fun. And I’m confident on guitar, and I had a lot of time to work out my parts. The thing you don’t get in a studio is time to write parts and time to execute them once you’ve got them. Sometimes you feel rushed. Then I sent it to Chad Copelin and he had to re-track bass on it, and he played keys on it. I had a guy play piano on it. And it was great, man!
Desi: It was a looong overdue process, but I think it was a necessary one. But it felt like it was just dragging on for a long time. But I think because of that it made everything better. On one of the songs, Waves of Memory, we ended going back and using the original scratch track vocal for that.
Cody: Yeah, the one we had even before the tape machine! It was a song where I wrote the song that night, and it was late, and I was like “Desi, please just come and track these vocals real quick.”
Desi: Yeah, he woke me up!
Cody: You were awake!
Desi: No, I remember!
Cody: And then she came over and grudgingly sounded great, and we used that scratch track for the drums and everything. I kept trying to get her to re-track vocals. But for some reason she could never get it to sound like that original performance that night, it was so great. Such an epic vocal performance. So we ended up using that, and if you listen to the track closely during the breaks when the band quiets down.. you can hear our window air unit from her vocal track. It kind of sounds cool. You know, whatever works.
Desi and Cody Track by Track Commentary:
“I’m Glad You Noticed Me” – Was there any specific reason this track opens the album?
Cody: If I have regrets about the album I think it’s putting that first instead of Skyline. I can’t remember what our reason was for switching it, but we switched it. I think the reason we picked it is because it’s sort of an introduction to Desi and Cody. We both sing at different parts, we’re having a conversation. I wrote that song when I knew I was going to ask Desi to marry me. It’s a fictional account of how we met. We obviously didn’t meet in high school. Maybe that’s why, I don’t know.
I think it was a good choice!
Cody: Ok good, that makes me feel better.
“I Wanna Feel Your Love”
Cody: Desi and I had gotten into an argument, I don’t know..it was pretty personal really. Ha-ha! It was mainly her bitching about me being aloof.
Desi: And when I bitch him out I sing like that, actually. So it’s a bit pleasant. It’s very poetic when I bitch him out.
Cody: I think more or less the argument was that I needed to be more attentive to the relationship maybe, than I had been. So it was one of those things where we had an argument and I argued back and realized she was right and I apologized and wrote her a song.
Desi: I love that song, and it’s very cool being a couple and working together. Sometimes works ends up sort of coming first though, you know what I mean? It’s sometimes easy to slip into that and you’ve got to realize “Wait a minute, we’re a couple.” And we record in our house and we eat in our house and we sleep in our house.
“Skyline” – You guys have said that this is more of an environmental song.
Cody: Yeah, we were driving through the desert and you know you’re getting close to a town when you start to see that glow on the horizon. I don’t know if I was having an acid flashback or something.. ha-ha! And I was just thinking, “what would it be like if we lived back in a time when the desert was just the desert?” Then you drive into the city and they all look the same.
What was the catalyst behind the idea for the music video?
Cody: Same thing like with the gas masks being like, symbolic of the pollution and the unclean air. Then there’s all these like free-spirited type people and these business-Wall-Street-type people. Then there’s the guy who goes in and working and getting old and run down, doing the same thing. Then you see all the children with gas masks forced into what we called the “corporate prison.”
On the bus everyone is happy for the most part, being sort of symbolic of environmentally friendly choices I guess. Riding bicycles, or the bus.
I thought it was a well-produced video.
Cody: Ugh, it was a nightmare! It was hot.
Desi: If you notice, my hair was blonde in part of it. My hair got shorter in part of it. Then it’s back to black. That was all because of how long it took, and things we had to do in order to have it make sense.
Cody: It was plagued with problems. The whole video. It took eight months.
Desi: We only shot three times, but all the editing and trying to get it right… it was very ambitious for a first music video. But it turned out great and I’m happy and shocked because I never would have envisioned it.
“Waves of Memory”
Cody: This one is about how Desi is a winter/fall girl, so I wrote that song about her. And I wrote Nightfall around the same time.
Are those actual flutes, or is that a Mellotron?
Cody: Those are actual flutes. There’s a guy playing the flute, and he actually played on a couple tracks. And then we took that and ran it through this thing that made it sound synth-y but still analog. It’s kind of interesting, it’s real flutes that we made sound kind of like Mellotron space flutes.
“Unfamiliar Road”
Desi: That’s one of the ones Cody wrote when I was in Oregon, and actually it’s just now getting to the point where I can sing it without losing it. I don’t normally like to talk about what a song’s about, because I’m looking for that person in the audience crying and thinking “Yeah, you get it.” Because it really was everything I wanted to say to my Dad and Oregon where I grew up. It gave my emotions a voice. I love that song.
Cody: Yeah, you get old and your family passes away and you go back to your old home town and it’s like.. it’s weird. You know? It doesn’t feel the same.
“Roll with It”
Cody: This song has been around for an eternity, I think. Seriously, the way I learned this song.. I didn’t write it.. I learned it. I was asleep, and I had this dream, and there was this old Victrola record player, and it had a 45 on it, it’s playing this song over and over like one hundred freaking times. It had this old western swing, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline singing harmonies together, really old sounding. Then finally after about an hour of the same song playing over and over, I woke up, and it was kind of like a nightmare. Any time you listen to a song that many times.. ugh. I woke up and was like “Oh, thank God it’s over.” And then I realized, “Wait a second.” I started running through the snow and Desi sees me going through it in my underwear to get my recording device out of the car. And so I’m literally running through the snow in my underwear.
Desi: And you left the door open too and woke me up! Another time you woke me up because of your music.
Cody: So I record it and go back to sleep. And then I wake up and think “Was that all a dream?” And I listen to the tape and it sounds like Tom Waits strung out on crack singing this song. I was just so tired. What’s funny is that every part of the song was there. The intro, all that stuff. All there. The way it ended sounding on the record is pretty dang close to the dream one.
It’s your “Yesterday” dream song!
Cody: Yeah, and this is where it gets even more ridiculous, and maybe I shouldn’t even say anything from here. But it was New Year’s Day when I woke up with that song. I play for a local singer/songwriter friend of mine on Mondays, and that Monday I went in, and we have a healthy songwriting competition, and I played that song for him. He looks up at me bewildered and says “Did you know that both Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt died on New Years Day?” And I’m like “What?” And he says (heavy Southern drawl) “Well I think they gave you a song” and I’m like “No. Bullshit.”
Desi: And he was mad at you!
Cody: Yeah, he was like “Dammit, Cody!”
Desi: Hank done visited you!
Cody: I think there was a lot of marijuana consumed that night. Really. It was ghosts! Ghosts!
I still feel like I can’t take credit for the song one way or the other. I didn’t work on it!
Desi: I remember you going crazy, and Googling to try and see if it was already a song.
Cody: It’s not the kind of thing I would normally write, you know, it’s weird.
Desi: Well I love it, and it’s my favorite way to start a set because it’s easy but it’s also a good message.
Cody: It’s our Whiskey River, we pretty much always open with it.
“Big Dream” – Was this more fictional or autobiographical?
Cody: That song is not autobiographical. It was originally written about New York. I had always kind of imagined going to New York. Then we ended up going to L.A. and I realized I liked the west coast better.
Desi: We ended up changing the lyrics from New York to L.A.
Cody: I think it applies more to acting than to music, but I don’t know. It’s not autobiographical.
“The Oracle”
Desi: Well my mother, Cody says she’s magical. People say she’s magical. I don’t know. She’s always doing these tarot cards and fortunes and stuff, she’s not a witch or anything. She would never claim that.
Cody: They play Witchy Woman at their house all day.
Desi: No! I guess the song is Cody just calling my mom “The Oracle.” There have been times where we doubted our future playing music, or our relationship, and all, and it’s not that my mother always sees stuff in the cards.
Cody: I look at it more as a game, we don’t really take it seriously.
Desi: Yeah, she calls me and says “Call me now for your free reading” and all (laughs) and it’s more like “Let’s get drunk and play with some tarot cards.”
Cody: Yeah, they’re not really witches or anything. They’re all pale-skinned Portland ladies with dark clothes.
Desi: But yeah, it’s about her.
Cody: And you guys are two peas in a pod.
Desi: Ha-ha!
Cody: And then it gets even more interesting when you find out that she grew up Mormon. But that’s a long story.
Desi: But we’re not Mormons! It was just my Dad who was Mormon.
“Nightfall”
Cody: Waves of Memory Was about Desi being a winter/fall girl and this is more about me being a spring/summer guy. Like the references to drum fish. I’m a little backwoods, believe it or not. Drum is a bit of a nasty fish, and they end up biting more than the others. And you get frustrated. Anyway, we were living in this house and it was sort of like the California Dreamin’ thing cause we were snowed in really bad. Played Yahtzee for hours. I wanted it to be summer so badly.
Desi: And I was in heaven because of the snow, and it was dark.
“Second Wind”
Cody: I had been watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos when I wrote that song. Like Carl Sagan and the Dalai Lama. It sounds so stupid whenever I say it.
Desi: We had been looking for, I know this sounds crazy, but my father had died and you’re looking for a spiritual outlet and like Cody mentioned earlier he had a Southern Baptist background. Mormon in my background, and we didn’t stick with that. And we just going around looking for other answers I think, so Dalai Lama and Carl Sagan, not in the religious sense, but just “I like the way this guy thinks.” I don’t know. I think that’s how this song kind of came about.
Cody: It was me dealing with death and the afterlife and all that.
The album is very laid back and relaxed, even on the more upbeat songs. Was that a conscious decision about this specific album?
Cody: It kind of happened because we wrote all the songs when we were working as a duo, so everything was acoustically written. Maybe on the next album we’ll have a little more up-beat and rock n’ roll. It’ll still be less rock n’ roll than a rock n’ roll record. Now we might we going more towards my Pixies and Sonic Youth type influence, actually.
How are you hoping people will respond to the album?
Cody: My whole goal the whole time I was making the record was just to make something I would enjoy myself and that hopefully everyone else wouldn’t hate. As long as they like it or enjoy it I’ve succeeded. If they don’t hate it and hear it all the way through once in their life I’ve succeeded.
How do you think the album fits in with the modern musical landscape? In time or out of time?
Cody: There is no time now. You have stuff like Sturgill Simpson and then you have Katy Perry and Fleet Foxes, and whatever. I feel like we’re in “The Age of Whatever.” I wasn’t really worried about genre on the record. I was more worried about recreating the same song over and over or people being confused about what we do in terms of genre. Because I was getting confused!
Desi: What kind of music do we play? I don’t know really..
Does Tulsa influence your music?
Cody: Well maybe, we have a song like Roll With It, I don’t know if that would have happened if we hadn’t lived here you know.
Desi: Yeah, I think we have a great music scene. What’s cool is how even though we’re a community and at times share the stage and stuff we’re all very different. You have some people who are really JJ Cale, Dwight Twilley, etc.
Cody: Yeah, and we have great pride in Leon Russell, JJ Cale, and how that attracted people like George Harrison and Paul McCartney.
And you guys work with kids in the community for a music appreciation program.
Cody: It’s great, makes me less jaded.
Desi: Cody kind of headed that, I don’t know how it came about.
(At this point, Cody stepped out for about fifteen minutes to meet with a gig manager)
Desi: Yeah, it’s really cool. Because it started as a summer camp for only three days. It was to try to give anyone who had an interest in middle school and high school a place to grow in music and raise awareness for the Woody Guthrie Center. Cody ended really liking it and so did the kids, and I don’t know if it was the Center’s idea or Cody’s to continue it but.. maybe it was Woody Guthrie! (laughs)
Well if Hank’s writing songs for Cody…
Desi: Right, we did the seance and Woody came and told Cody to do it.. naw.. I’m just kidding. (laughs) Actually they ended up requesting more in the Fall and we did it every Friday. At first we helped them form bands and write songs. How to play in a band, get recorded, perform, etc. It’s not really music lessons, Cody teaches more how to get started in the music world. Every semester is something different. I think next time we’re doing Pro Tools and media.
How are you feeling about the touring coming up?
Desi: I’ve had good experiences in the past. I remember when Cody was telling me about the touring life and he said “It’s going to be hard, we’ve got to sleep on people’s floor and eat ramen noodles.” And I’m like, “It doesn’t have to be that way!” We’re a couple, it’s different than a band of eight guys. I have food allergies, so I can’t eat Taco Bell or ramen noodles. Darn! I actually love to tour, but I have to experience where we’re at. Instead of just arriving and leaving in the dark. Half the fun is seeing the country. It’s hard sometimes though. One time we were staying with some people in some small town in New Mexico. The owner of a bar was like “Yeah, I’ve got a place!” And we think, oh, the owner of a bar, this place will be nice!” But we got there and there was a shotgun with shells next to it, some guy in the back who won’t come out. Some weird moldy thing in the corner and super high carpet…I thought “Oh my God we’re going to die here Cody!” I think we got a horrible cold too.
Is touring with your spouse a good experience?
Desi: Yeah, you’re working but it’s almost like a vacation. I know that sounds weird, because you’re working. But you’re more likely to say what’s on your mind to you significant other than your band-mates, so there’s none of that hidden anger or anything. Or passive-aggressive stuff, you know? We don’t have to hide our emotions.
Both of you went through some tough times to get to where you are now, and now the album is coming out and the tour coming up. Would you say you’re happy where you are now?
Desi: We did go through a lot of ups and downs happy and bad memories for sure. It’s just life and great references for writing. And how cool is it that our lives and thoughts are recorded? It gets jaded when things are the same. I feel glad about where we’re at and I’m very hopeful. Just knowing that we’re getting to get on the road, that we’re getting to do interviews like this, that there’s people outside of where we are now showing interest in what we do. It’s super exciting!
(Cody came back at this point, and we mostly discussed his heavy-metal listening cousins, and possibly creating a new A&E reality show called Cousin Swap about his redneck relations and Desi’s Oregon Mormons.)
Desi & Cody can be purchased on Itunes.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/desi-and-cody/id1031055414
