Interview with Jocelyn and Chris: ‘Blues is our bread and butter’

New York bluesy rock siblings Jocelyn and Chris are working on their eight studio album, Favorite Ghosts, which will likely be released around January next year.

They got into music at a very young age, according to Chris: ‘I was in third grade, she was in fourth, when she started having piano lessons and I started guitar,’ he said. ‘We had to take it in turns to practice in the room, so one of us was always waiting for the other to finish. We started to play together and then, in middle school, we started writing our own original songs.’ Jocelyn nods: ‘It seemed like the next thing to do. We were really lucky, we had a supportive local radio station, WEXT, and they said if we wrote our own songs, they’d play them. We had our first song written two weeks later.’

In June, they released their incredibly catchy single ‘Sugar and Spice’, which marks the first single from their upcoming album, which will comprise 11 tracks. ‘We’re really proud of the album,’ Jocelyn said. ‘It feels like every album gets closer to who we want to be, and this one is the truest that statement has ever felt. I’m so proud and grateful that we got to do it. With this song, it started with that riff… it just got stuck in our brains! I started jamming a melody over it – it had this summery, sugar-and-spice push-and-pull.’ I say that it’s the opening riff that really pulls you in and Chris gets very animated: ‘It’s just E and A, 1/4 back and forth.’

As the song goes: ‘Right about now, you got me thinking it through. Talking ’bout the who, what, where, when, why and the how. Yeah, I’ve been coming unglued and what’s the use? Right about now, I don’t know how I can take the heartache, and you’ve been showing up right on cue. By God, I hope I’m right about you.’

‘We got to come back to songs and look at them afresh’

Luckily, they had four or five songs recorded before COVID struck last year, according to Chris. ‘Then we shut down for four-to-five months,’ he said. ‘The silver lining is that sometimes you can lose sight of what you’re trying to do with a song, but with COVID, we got to come back to songs and look at them afresh and decide if there was anything we wanted to do differently.’

Lockdown last year also gave them the chance to experiment and to collaborate with musician friends such as Chad Michael, Scotty V, and Avanti Nagral in India to put together the best cover of Alannah Myles’ ‘Black Velvet’ I have ever heard, keeping true to the heart of the original but making it their own due to the engaging and eclectic group of musicians featuring on it. ‘I’ve always loved singing this song,’ Jocelyn said. ‘Our manager, David, he produces all our records and he plays drums for us when we play live, we’d covered it with him as well. He organised the whole thing and edited the video. It was so heartwarming to see all the other musicians holed up as we were and to get to do this when we were all suffering from music withdrawal.’

They’ve put their own spin on other covers, too, notably Bob Dylan’s ‘Meet Me in the Morning’, which is edgier, bluesier and more riff-driven than the original. ‘We were slated to do a performance last April at an awards ceremony in New York, with every artist on the bill choosing one song from his album Blood On The Tracks, and we chose that one,’ Chris said. I say that the bluesey opening riff, which is incredibly hooky, is what gives their version such an edge. Chris laughs: ‘It’s so great! It’s just a standard 12-bar blues, but Dylan came up with this awesome riff to show it off. You can’t beat the classics. Blues is our bread and butter.’ Jocelyn nods: ‘I know, that riff, right?! He did a good job with that one!’

Interestingly, some live versions of their songs are very different to the recorded versions, particularly tracks such as ‘Witness’ from their 2019 album, The Fun in the Fight. When they perform it live, Chris launches into the song with an incredible solo that lasts around a minute and a half. ‘I love playing that solo so much,’ Chris smiles. ‘I basically just turn on all my effects, chorus, delay, reverb, the whole thing, and then go wild for a few minutes. It’s so much fun!’ Soon after, bandmates Dan (bass guitar), David (drums), and Ty (organ) join in with a series of driving, rich power chords. Jocelyn doesn’t join the fray until around two and a half minutes in. ‘He tears it up there for a while,’ Jocelyn laughed. I joke that she gets a bit of a break at the start. ‘Yeah, I could go and get a coffee, couldn’t I?!’ For me, it would be a brilliant set opener: ‘We had been using two other songs, ‘Footprints on the Moon’ and ‘Too Much to Me’ to open our set and decided it was time for a change,’ Chris said. ‘That song is so infectious, we wanted to give it something extra for a lot of power!’ Jocelyn is laughing: ‘It’s so cool that when you start playing it, you can’t tell what it is,’ she tells him. ‘You noodle your way into it and then you finally break loose!’

The duo write all of their songs together, with Jocelyn typically writing the melody and Chris the chord progressions: ‘He’s the glue,’ Jocelyn said. They’ve just got back from their first nationwide tour in 18 months, which gave them a chance to test out some of the songs slated for the new album. ”Sugar and Spice’ just gets people dancing,’ Jocelyn said. ‘We haven’t decided for sure but ‘Run Away’ might be our next single.’ She describes ‘Run Away’, which will be released in late autumn/winter as having been written ‘in the throes of lockdown’: ‘It was that sentiment that we wished we could all run away,’ she said. As Chris puts it: ‘It was the one thing we couldn’t do.’

‘There are a bunch of horror movies references in it’

Next up, will be another single around Halloween titled ‘Skeleton Key’. ‘There are a bunch of horror movie references in it,’ Chris said, looking delighted. ‘It rocks really hard. There’s this sort of undulating guitar riff and the band just brings it to the next level. It’s one of our highest energy songs for sure!’

Initially, they weren’t sure which single from the album to release first, so they gave three potential singles to focus groups. ‘But they tied,’ Chris said. ‘In the end, we picked the one we liked the most.’ Jocelyn jumps in: ‘It’s really tricky to choose. Every time with an album, we’ve lived with the songs for so long, particularly this time.’

In late 2019, they recorded their ‘One Night in November’ live album comprising eight tracks, including the opening one, ‘Mercy Me’, a beautiful, heartfelt track about being crazy about someone. As the song begins: ‘Piece it out in parts, babe, tell me where it goes. Come and use your fingers to keep me on my toes. Say it in a whisper, play it like a scream, over and over, ’til I  wake up from this dream.’

‘I love the lyric “I’ve got a half a mind to give you all my heart”, it’s such an excellent thing to base a song around,’ Chris said. I agree and say it’s the takeaway line from the song that you remember afterwards and Jocelyn nods: ‘It felt so warm, it’s so special, it felt like the perfect time to record it,’ she said. ‘This album is one of my favourite recordings. It was a really special night. We got a bunch of family and friends together, sat them in a semi-circle, talked to people and played. We played ‘Sugar and Spice’ for the first time, although it’s not on the record.’ Chris nods: ‘We finalised it that morning, didn’t we?’

‘We’ve always been really committed to music, we’ve never written a song without the other’

The US has started opening up to live music and they have several gigs lined up going into the autumn. I ask them what it’s like working on their music full-time as siblings who also share a flat together, given that history is replete with musician siblings working together, some more harmoniously than others and they laugh: ‘We have normal sibling moments like everyone else,’ Jocelyn said. ‘Yeah, I definitely DID put the trash out last night,’ Chris deadpanned. Jocelyn shoots him a look that makes me think that he probably didn’t. ‘It’s always been the two of us,’ she said. ‘We’ve always been really committed to music, we’ve never written a song without the other.’ I say that it sounds very symbiotic. ‘It is, we’re really lucky,’ she said.

They’re fans of the band Phantogram, an American music duo from Greenwich, New York: ‘They’re cool kids, like alt industrial, with lots of harsh, grating synths woven into pop sounds,’ Chris said. He’s also a huge fan of American blues rock guitarist Joe Bonamassa and still laments the day his dad got him a ticket to see him but he wasn’t able to go: ‘I wouldn’t turn down a jam with anyone, if Joe Bonamassa wanted to, I’d faint! I’d also love to jam with Jimmy Page or Dave Gilmour.’ If she could have done a duet with anyone, Jocelyn picks Freddie Mercury: ‘He’s incomparable,’ she said. ‘Or Aretha Franklin or Grace Slick – I love her so much, three notes and you know who it is. Or Pat Benatar – she’s short and has a big voice like me!’

The siblings, both recent graduates of Harvard University – Jocelyn was an English major and Chris studied computer science with a music module – have balanced college with performances coast to coast and recordings featuring special guests Cory Wong of Vulfpeck, G. Love, and Gov’t Mule’s Danny Louis. They’ve been featured on NBC’s Today Show and have performed at festivals including Sundance, Summerfest, SXSW, and on the main stage at Mountain Jam Music Festival. Music has always been a huge part of their lives: ‘Our parents have this giant CD collection,’ Jocelyn said. ‘There was a rule that we couldn’t have dinner without music playing in the background. Chris wore out a Lynyrd Skynyrd CD, haha! They played people like Sarah McLachlan (a Canadian singer-songwriter), we were really lucky to have all that music.’ Chris jumps in: ‘Part of it is that my dad gets really annoyed to hear people chew, so I think this was his way of covering it up! It was a winner either way!’