CALICO the band

CALICO the band is a California band in the deepest, most natural sense of the term. Specifically, the moniker (all caps, please) is shorthand for California country—as if that weren’t vividly apparent from the first moments of Under Blue Skies, the group’s resonant, accomplished sophomore album, with its musical intricacy, lyrical eloquence and timeless immediacy. The thought-provoking, tightly harmonized songs of founder/leaders Manda Mosher and Kirsten Proffit exist in a continuum with the seminal form Gram Parsons famously dubbed Cosmic American Music. The sound of Under Blue Skies is informed by the duo’s shared love of Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Eagles, the Everly Brothers, Fleetwood Mac and, of course, the Beatles. Their songwriting touchstones include Joni Mitchell (whose “Ladies of the Canyon” they cover on the album), Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, The Band and Tom Petty. Mosher and Proffit feel so connected to this classic music that they’re able to bring it into the present tense and make it their own. “We’re passionate about carrying on the tradition by incorporating our influences, but through a new lens,” says Proffit. “The reason our music comes across as honest is because we’re not trying to be anything but ourselves—this is who we are and what we do. We’ve been lucky enough to have that California sound permeate who we are since our childhoods.” The partners are California natives with back stories so perfectly complementary they could’ve been scripted, the screenwriter inevitably rendering their predestined intersection as “second-generation hippie meets showbiz kid.” Proffit’s parents were nomadic hippies who roamed from Santa Cruz to Majorca, Spain, and back again with their little girl in tow. Mosher’s family on her mother’s side has been in California since the wagon-train era, while her grandfather was writer and creator of classic sitcoms including Leave It to Beaver and The Munsters. One key ingredient the two sets of parents had in common was their record collections, which shaped the two youngsters’ sensibilities in a profound and lasting way. “I also listened to the radio when I was a kid—Depeche Mode and all the electronic stuff,” Manda points out. “I liked that too, but in my mind it didn’t compare in quality to my parents’ music. So when I started making music myself, it came down to the organic basics of songwriting, guitars, harmonies and storytelling.” The memory that’s embedded in Kirsten’s consciousness takes place around the family pool, fittingly enough. “It’s summertime, my dad is grinding up meat, and ‘Teach Your Children’ is playing on the stereo,” she says. “I’ve just gotten out of the pool, and I’m lying on the carpet, soaking wet, filled with this feeling of calm and happiness. Whenever I think of that moment, my eyes fill with tears. In moments like that, the music you’re hearing becomes part of who you are.” When the two met in 2012, they were traveling parallel paths as L.A.-based singer/songwriters plotting their next moves. Kirsten was booking a tour for an album she’d just finished recording, and Manda was playing local shows, one of which Kirsten attended. As members of the city’s roots community, they were aware of each other and followed each other on social media. A prescient promoter thought they’d make a great double bill at the House of Blues, an offer neither could refuse, despite the promoter’s insistence on dubbing the show “Goddesses of Americana,” as they laughingly recall. Kirsten and Manda decided to do a song together, agreeing on Lucinda Williams’ “Change the Locks”; they met for the first time at rehearsal and instantly felt a spark. As they observed each other, Manda had a realization. “You’re kind of a lone ranger, like me,” she said to Kirsten, and in that moment, the spark became a flame of inspiration, yielding their first collaboration, “Lone Ranger.” At that point, says Kristen, “There was no denying that there was something special happening musically between us. We didn’t even have a plan in terms of what we wanted to sound like. I remember asking Manda, ‘What is our sound?’ We just started playing, and that’s what it sounded like.” Rancho California, CALICO’s first album, took more than a year to make—“because we were touring like crazy,” says Manda. “We found we were getting bookings far more easily than either of us had been able to do on our own, and we took advantage of it; we played over 200 shows, writing and recording the whole time. We started a label, California Country Records, self-funded our first record and released it ourselves in the fall of 2014. We’d made solo records and had publishing deals, so we’d been through enough to know how to piece together a good support team for radio, press and film-and-TV licensing. The momentum started building from there: We got on the Americana chart, played theaters and festivals including Stagecoach and Americana Fest, and got syncs on songs from the record right out of the gate; the first one was for the ABC series Nashville, and the latest is for The Ranch, Ashton Kutcher’s show on Netflix. It became a groundswell, and we had a lot of cheerleaders. While all this was happening, we started working on the next record.” “We dug in deeper on this record from a songwriting standpoint,” Manda continues. “Because we’ve spent so much time together, we feel more comfortable expressing vulnerability in the lyrics; there are definitely more love songs. There’s certainly meaning to Rancho California, but it’s more broad strokes; on Under Blue Skies, we were able to dig in and get more personal.”

Van Nuys, CA