Interview with Harrison Scarecrow: ‘I spend a lot of time tweaking lyrics and I will continue tweaking them until Will tells me to stop!’

Indie noir duo Harrison Scarecrow from Alabama in the US have released their debut single, ‘Everyone With Someone’ today (30 October), a poignant track about broken dreams.

The duo comprises Ryan Tomlin (vocals, guitar and bass) and Will McCracken (piano, organ, synth and drums). Their name is a blend of McCracken’s family name – Harrison – and Tomlin’s nickname, ‘scarecrow’ because he’s tall and skinny. They met as children in a small town, Athens, in Alabama, although Tomlin currently lives near Venice Beach in LA and McCracken is in Colorado.

Paradoxically, ‘Everyone With Someone’ is actually about the fact that ‘not everyone gets to be with someone’, according to Tomlin. They wrote the track from their prospective locations and sent the music back and forth: ‘Will sent me the piano part and I added the vocal part and sent it back to him. He arranged the string section; we do most of the writing on midi. Will hired players to record the strings live at a studio in Muscle Shoals last year. On the surface, the song is about a break-up but it’s also about the broader loss of love, hope and friendship. Dreams are as likely to die as to come true.’

The lyrics are quite bleak: ‘Churchyard medicine and brown bag wine, the Hells Gate tunnel to the cemetery sign, the blue smoke drugs wrapped inside our chest, an innocent jump from the bluff to the riverbed, so paint your eyes black in your mama’s gown, no one’s coming back, no one’s getting out.’

In the accompanying video to the song, Tomlin walks along the beach in Marina del Rey in Los Angeles County before walking out into the sea at the end, implying that he is about to take his own life. When I ask him if we are supposed to infer that he dies at the end, he smiles and tells me that he survives the swim.

Harrison Scarecrow has another four songs ready to release, according to Tomlin, and another five they would like to record. ‘The plan is to release a few more singles next year and then an album in the fall of 2021,’ he said. 

‘The current contender for the follow-up single is a track called ‘Coldland View’ but we are heading into the studio in December to finish tracking the rest of the album. It will be the first time we will actually be together in a studio! Before, we had to record alone and share files digitally. We’re currently considering the next single with our label, Integrity Records, but these new songs feel like some of our best to date and hopefully will be strong contenders.’

He describes the mellow track as ‘a nostalgic song about returning to a place that you remember with great affection and realizing time and age have changed you both’. As the lyrics go: ‘Long backroad drive, the Coldland is coming into view, the eyes I remember aren’t the same, I’ve been looking through,  winter moves over the pines, and over who I have become, over the countryside, where we used to be young, if I could be anything,  if I could be anything, if I could be anything, I’d be here.’

‘I write a lot of words, it’s like a puzzle putting them together so that the syllables fall in rhythm with the beat’

Typically, Tomlin writes the lyrics: ‘They’re mostly my domain but I rely heavily on Will’s input. I spend a lot of time tweaking lyrics and I will continue tweaking them until Will tells me to stop! The best songs happen when Will has some music on the piano and I find the words to go on top. I write a lot of words, it’s like a puzzle putting them together so that the syllables fall in rhythm with the beat.’

Influenced by singers such Bruce Springsteen and fellow Alabama native Jason Isbell, Harrison Scarecrow move from sparse piano and vocal pieces to full band sounds with a driving rhythm section. Tomlin is a massive fan of Stevie Ray Vaughan, best known as the guitarist and frontman of the blues rock band Double Trouble. ‘I used to try and act like him when I played guitar,’ he laughed. ‘Growing up as kids, Will and I played southern rock together, like The Allmann Brothers Band. We went to college in Florence, Alabama, where there were darker rock bands that we really like, such as The Drive-By Truckers (an alternative country/Southern rock band based in Athens, Georgia).’ 

Lockdown has been a challenge from a songwriting perspective: ‘For me, writing is best when everything is going well, even if the songs sound sad and dark. I go through the motions but it’s been a stressful time,’ Tomlin said.

These days, Tomlin and McCracken are huge fans of bands like American folk rock band Dawes and American rock band Delta Spirit. ‘Will and I have never toured together, if that ever happens, we think the those two bands would be fun to hit the road with.’

(Photo: Will and Ryan)