The Winetree Interview: Part One | 08/07/2010

by Biaka Zaidarhzauva

Something about the soft picking of an acoustic guitar coming out of the beat-up stereo on my buddy’s truck grabbed my attention.  Within a second of the listening to the words, “Her heart broke, I swore it sounded like a cannon…” a sad loneliness crashed over me. The conversation I was having quickly faded into the background along with the violent strokes of the engine, as I just sat there listening.  Its rare to have that kind of a moment when listening to any song, especially a song that starts playing randomly out of the blue.  I tracked the song down, The Civil War Song by The Winetree.  Intrigued and hungry for more  I started asking around, and pretty soon I had my own bootleg copy of The Winetree’s Kentucky.  I loaded the album onto my computer; and played it non-stop for almost a week.

Kentucky by The Winetree

Flash forward about four years later, and here I am interviewing Ryan Harvey and Isaiah Muller of The Winetree.  Two genuinely chill guys, who’d rather give their music away for free than to give me crap for burning their music off of a friend’s copy (of a copy).  Isaiah Muller who also played the fiddle in the band John Brown and the Cougars (Joplin, Mo) was kind enough to introduce me to the other half of the Winetree, Ryan Harvey via ‘Book Face’ and here we are, talking …

The Winetree

The Winetree

Hello Destroyers:  Hey guys for the sake of our friends around the world would you introduce yourselves?

Isaiah Muller:  I’m Isaiah Muller.  I was born and raised in Clark County, KY.

Ryan Harvey:  I’m Ryan Harvey.  I live in Clark County, KY, but I grew up in a place called Viper in eastern Kentucky.

HD3:  So how’d you guys start playing music?

IM:  I grew up taking violin and piano lessons, reading music, all that stuff – always listening to a variety of things that took me to entirely different places.  I remember listening to my dad’s records – Mungo Jerry’s first album, Harry Chapin, Lionel Richie.  A weird mix of stuff I couldn’t really wrap my head around, mixed in with a lot of classical and jazz I got into when I was a teenager – all mixed in with living in Kentucky, and being lucky enough to absorb some of the things that have produced so many amazing musicians here. So then I went to college, briefly, and met some people who pushed me a lot musically – and actually ended up meeting Ryan in the dorm bathroom…  I guess that’s fitting.

RH:  I remember hearing “I guess that’s why they call it the blues” by Elton John when I was a kid at my grandparents’ house, and I just loved it…that and Huey Lewis’s “if this is it”.  Dad had a collection of records and tapes, and papaw, dad’s dad, gave me all kinds of recorded blues tapes to listen to.  I started playing guitar and trying to write songs when I was about 16 years old…met Isaiah in that bathroom years later, talked about maybe playing some music together, and here we are.

HD3:  So how did you and Ryan end up playing the style that you play?  Were there any other styles of music you guys tried?  Rap, reggae, techno or did country/folk just grab you guys?

RH:  I think the music just came out that way. I showed up with an acoustic guitar, and he had a fiddle.   That combination of instruments along with the music we both were into just kind of took us in that direction. Although, we really wanted to sound like Destiny’s Child, but we just didn’t have it in us.   Not then…

HD3:  Speaking of Destiny’s Child, how do you guys decide who sings what songs, or who writes what?   Are you ever worried about one of you becoming the “Beyonce” of The Winetree? (as in: leaving the other in the background while using the Winetree as a way to propel yourself in the music industry…hey you brought it up!)

IM:  Well I think if either of us was trying to get propelled into the music business we could find a lot more hardcore sell-out means of doing it than the Winetree.  There’s a lot of slickness out there, a lot of glossy 8×10 headshots and $100 messy haircuts and Nashville restaurants looking for waiters – but we’re not slick people, really.  I think we’d lose something buying into all that.  As far as who sings or writes what, there are two big factors – first, Ryan and I are each huge fans of what the other one does.  I think we push each other to take the lead and write more – mostly because each of us is lazy about it and needs to be pushed.  Secondly, we gladly accept criticism from each other, which is unusual.  So we typically each bring something to the table and then cut it up and rebuild it together into something better. I feel like Ryan’s songs are mine as well, and vice versa.  Hopefully that declaration will hold up in copyright court some day when I’m suing him.

HD3: So how long have you guys been playing together as the Winetree?

L-R: Isaiah Muller, Ryan Harvey

IM:  We’ve been playing together since 2003 or so, and I’m not certain at what point we transitioned into what we’re doing now.  I guess we’ve always been The Winetree, deep in our hearts. (I wish I was the kind of person who said things like that.)

HD3:  Ok, so what’s the story behind the name “the Winetree”?

IM:  We talked about what to call ourselves for a long time, and came up with some great band names that were already taken. Around that time our good friend TJ decided to handcraft a sweater in support of winter, his favorite season. TJ completed ironing the letters onto one of his best sweaters – only to find that he had misspelled the season as “WINETR”. He wanted to salvage the sweater so he added the “EE” on the end. That’s the gist of it, it sounded good so we stole the name.

HD3:  You mentioned before that its about the music, and Kentucky wasn’t an official release.  Do you plan on having an official release? An EP? a demo or will it all be online and free for the kids?

IM:  As far as releasing music, at this point we’ve pretty much decided to give whatever we record away. We just want people to listen to it, and we figure since we haven’t paid to make a recording yet we can get away with giving it away for a while. We recorded “Kentucky” with a computer microphone and free software, and some friends around Morehead, KY helped us with some more songs recently. So, yeah – free songs for everyone, sometime soon.

HD3:  Ok, so onto a more personal question; alot of the songs are very personal, about past love or yearning for some lost love, how do you deal with playing these songs now?   Do they serve to close a chapter or serve as a bitter-sweet reminder, and since you both are married, how do your wives take these songs?

IM:  Personally, I think most of the songs I’ve written were more expressions than reminiscences. There may be a fact somewhere alongside a song, but chances are it’s grown out past recognition. I think songwriting can get you in touch with your subconscious in a hurry – like, I don’t feel like the song “You can go” is my story, but I feel like I’ve had moments on that bastard-level. I feel our songs when we sing them, but I couldn’t really give a play-by-play. I think people have sometimes identified with them, and that’s an easy thing to mess up by explaining too much. Some of them are ridiculous, too. That’s another factor. We like to look back and laugh at songs we thought we really had something with. Our wives know us better than our songs do – they know we’re not as sweet or thoughtful in real life, but our songs let them know we’re not as emotionally void as we can be. They know the bastard-level too. They support what we do, and they’re great. We love our wives. We’re going to let them carry our amps on the world tour 2012.

RH:  Most of the songs I write are pretty personal. If they’re not about me, someone I know, or somewhere I’ve been, they’re certainly shaped by those things. When we play these songs, each one takes me to a specific time and place and brings certain emotions…that place could be my grandparents’ house on the Ohio River where I have a lot of childhood memories or the upstairs room in my old house where Isaiah and I were finishing off a bottle of wine trying to figure out what words rhyme with “fields”. The great thing about music, and I hope it happens with ours, is that ten people can hear the same song, and each person will connect with it in a different way. As far as the past love/lost love songs go, those experiences have brought us to where we are now. I just hope people like them. My wife and I have been together for quite a while now, and she’s always been really supportive and likes our songs. Also, I think both of our wives get that if we sing a song written about another girl from the past, we’re not saying those feelings are coming back.

to be continued in Part Two

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Tags: folk, isaiah muller, john brown and the cougars, Music, ryan harvey, the winetree, winetree

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