The Everybodyfields Make Breaking Up Sound Beautiful
By Andrew Clayman
Published (with edits) in The Cleveland Scene (Village Voice), May 2008
See Alternate Everybodyfields Feature in the Knoxville Metro Pulse
Their story may have started out like a fairy tale, but for Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews, a sad country ballad always seemed more suitable.
As the two singer/songwriters for acclaimed Knoxville alt-country act The Everybodyfields, Quinn and Andrews are currently touring behind one of the more intriguing and heartbreakingly honest breakup albums in recent memory. With an appropriate title to boot, Nothing Is Okay offers the rare opportunity to hear both sides of a failed relationship tell their story, often in ironically perfect harmony. For both Quinn and Andrews-- interviewed separately for this story-- the album was a chance to come to terms with their past, while still paving the way for their band’s future.
“I think the album just kind of made itself, through the course of our lives,” says Andrews. She is the epitome of the Southern belle—sweet-voiced and painfully pretty.
“It was a real pain in the ass,” counters Quinn. He has the laid back look of a hacky-sack enthusiast, complete with a pair of muttonchops straight from Neil Young’s storage closet. “Everything was kind of falling apart there for a while,” he continues. “We had come so far with this thing, and now it was almost like seeing your child in intensive care, and everyone wants to pull the plug.”
According to Quinn, the Everybodyfields finally came to the fork in the road while on their way to a gig in Boone, NC, in 2006. Broken up and barely on speaking terms, Quinn and Andrews had to decide if the end of their personal relationship would mean the end of their musical partnership, as well.
“On that car ride, instead of deciding to break up the entire band and trash our plans, we decided to carry on,” Quinn says. “Later, I approached Jill and said, ‘Look, we need to make this record. How about we call it Nothing Is Okay, and just make it about these problems?’ The idea was for Jill to take her tunes and me to take mine, and just to do whatever we wanted.”
Andrews agreed to give the concept a shot, and after a series of tumultuous sessions in Nashville, Nothing Is Okay finally emerged as the band’s surprisingly cohesive and intensely heartbreaking third album in August of 2007.
“We were writing the songs separately,” Andrews says, “but I think we knew that it would work together in the end. Sam and I, musically, are very, very entwined. We like a lot of the same stuff. We’re influenced by a lot of the same stuff. So, without hearing any of what he was writing, I knew what it would be. And I think he was thinking the same thing about what I was writing.”
This deep understanding of one another seemed to be present from the moment Quinn and Andrews met. It was 1999, and they were 19 year-old counselors at a Methodist summer camp in the Smoky Mountains. When it came time for the duo to sing together around the obligatory campfire, something just clicked.
“It happened with Jill so early on,” Quinn recalls. “I realized, ‘oh shit, I don’t have to tell this girl anything!’ I just have to show her a song and she’s right on it. It was pretty amazing.”
“The first time we really got together, we sang a Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris duet,” says Andrews.
Quinn remembers that it was “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning.”
“Just the way a guy and a girl’s voice can fit together,” he says, “it can make something really great. When you throw a little twang into it, you can make a sad song with one person singing it a whole lot sadder with two people singing harmonies.”
With a mutual love for cerebral country performers like Gillian Welch, the Jayhawks, and eventually, each other, Quinn and Andrews soon formed The Everybodyfields, a name borrowed from Quinn’s childhood moniker for his backyard (a la the “Hundred Acre Wood” in Winnie the Pooh). Based out of Johnson City, TN, the band released a pair of well-received records in 2004 and 2005, and was soon heralded as one of the top new acts in “alt-country”— a vague classification that’s been known to annoy some musicians.
“I actually like the phrase ‘alt-country,’ myself,” Andrews says. “A lot of people these days are just turned off by the term ‘country,’ period. Adding the ‘alt’ kind of gives those people an excuse to be like, ‘oh, maybe this isn’t so bad,’” she laughs.
“It doesn’t mean much to me,” Quinn says. “I’d just call it honest music.”
Honesty is certainly at the core of Nothing Is Okay, an album bursting at the seams with self-reflection, regret, and some acceptance for good measure. Eerily, the subject of each song is also singing backup—whether it’s Andrews on Quinn’s “Don’t Turn Around” or vise versa on “Wasted Time.”
“Because we were writing about the same situation, it’s kind of like a call and response album,” Andrews says.
“It was just a real hard record to make,” adds Quinn. “If Jill and I weren’t in a band together, we probably wouldn’t talk for five years or something. So, just out of necessity, you kind of have to look at that person as not being the same person she used to be—sort of like Anakin Skywalker had to be killed off,” he laughs. “You know, Jill is mostly machine now.”
Andrews doesn’t exactly concede that point. “I don’t know if you’ve ever broken up with somebody who you then had to be around every day—very, very difficult,” she says. “But that’s what we had to do to keep the band together. And now, it seems like things are finally working themselves out.”
“We’re just trying to get things in our lives more straight, where we can figure this out a little more without it having to be so hard,” Quinn says. “It seems the pleasures of life go a lot quicker than the lingering hardships. But I still think there’s better stuff ahead for this outfit.”
“I have a lot of respect for Sam,” Andrews says. “I would say he has the same for me. It’s just an every day sort of conscious decision to say, okay, we can still do this together.”
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