Cricket Blue — 8 February 2023 on Rocket Shop Radio Hour
Cricket Blue joined host Tom Proctor on ‘Rocket Shop,’ Big Heavy World’s weekly local Vermont music radio hour on 105.9 FM The Radiator. Catch up with them at cricketbluemusic.com
On Wednesday, February 8, host Tom Proctor was joined by Cricket Blue, an indie chamber folk duo based in Burlington.
The duo is made up of Taylor Smith and Laura Heaberlin, both of whom are guitarists and singer-songwriters. The two formed Cricket Blue in summer of 2013, and have been collaborating ever since to create intricate, spellbinding ballads that feature fluttering dueling guitar patterns and smoothly blended vocal harmonies. At Rocket Shop, they presented a mix of old and new songs, some off of their 2019 debut album, ‘Serotinalia,’ and some never before heard by audiences!
One new song featured in Wednesday’s set was “Landfills, Gardens, Nurseries,” a song written quite recently by Laura, inspired by her seasonal moral unease about killing the ants that invade her kitchen. “When I lived in Burlington, I had an ant infestation that came around every March. I would try really hard to not kill them, and then they’d get more and more and more, and eventually I’d kill them. So that was happening, and It was one of those things where there was a song loose in the room – it was haunting my printer, the printer was making all these noises. I was like, ‘ok, there’s a song in here I’ve got to capture,’” she said.
The resulting piece is arresting– the graceful, cascading minor guitar harmonies create an atmosphere that is at once sinister, gorgeous, and dreamlike, artfully conjuring the complexity and unease embedded in our mundane relationship with house pests. This feeling is complemented by ornate and haunting lyrics. “I mix it up with sugar, they’ll take anything. / It happens slowly, / so they can bring it to their nest, a judas kiss, they give it to each other.”
Laura’s supernatural inspiration for this song is not an anomaly for this group. One song, written by Taylor, came about when he heard it played by Phoebe Bridgers in a dream. “When I played it for Laura, she was like ‘that doesn’t sound like a Phoebe Bridgers song,’ Which I guess is good in a way, because it means I didn’t rip off some specific song,” he said.
During the decade that they’ve played together, Taylor and Laura have honed and developed their collaborative process: “We’ve slowly been moving closer to truly co-writing things. At first, we would just write songs separately and bring them to the person and be like ‘I hope you like this, because this is the song!’ And then, we moved into a phase where we would give each other little notes or suggest things. But for the recent things, there’s still a person who ‘owns’ the song, who first came up with the vision, but there’s a lot of revising together,” said Taylor.
The music borne of this newly collaborative process is contributing to an album that Cricket Blue has planned for the near future. The upcoming project contemplates death and how it permeates our lives, from the differing perspectives of Laura and Taylor. “Laura and I have a lot of different ideas about death. I think the album will be structured like a conversation… There's a meta-conversation going on between the songs,” said Taylor. Specific dates for the project are up in the air, but the duo hopes to have the album recorded by mid-summer.
Other exciting things in the band’s future to watch out for include a valentine’s day show at Shelburne vineyard on Tuesday, February 14, and a concert in Glenn Falls, NY on March 9. For more information and updates from Cricket Blue, you can find them at https://www.cricketbluemusic.com.
Text by Gideon Parker
Monochrome photo by Ross Mickel