Highlights:
**Original song "Waverly" featured on Continental Airlines in-flight radio this winter 2007.
**Jen awarded FEMALE VOCALIST OF THE WEEK by reviewer's pick in the Americana Genre, Garage Band Records.com
**Song "Waverly" awarded TRACK OF THE DAY by reviewer's pick in the Americana Genre, Garage Band Records.com
**Song Brighter From Here placed in made for TV movie "Playing House" airing on the Lifetime Network May 15, 2006
**Animal Planet's "Horse Power" places MT music in 5 episodes this season
**Accepted for Border's Books & Music GLS New Emerging Artist Program in which BBM will feature MT's new Album, Forget October, in all their stores across the US. March & April 2006
**Adopted by MVYRadio.com (15th largest internet radio in the world) for their new adopt-a-band program.
**WINNER Best Americana Album of the Year, Just Plain Folk Awards (Sleeping Dogs 2004)
**New album Forget October goes to #3 on the Nude music reviews chart on XM Cafe CH45, XM Satellite Radio
**Song Brighter From Here featured in CTV (Canada) & Lifetime Channel made for TV movie "Playing House"
**Song Some Peace Tonight featured in CBS made for TV movie "It Must Be Love".
**Sleeping Dogs album selected Top 12 DIY in Performing Songwriter magazine, 2002
**Christmas Lights album wins partridge award, best holiday releases, Grand Rapids Press
**Falcon Ridge Folk Festival New Emerging Artist Showcase, 2002

The clamor and shouting are over, yet they buzz in the eardrum like a lingering memory. Outside, couples still high on the music laugh and call out in the cool evening. But inside the mood fades. A bartender swipes a damp towel across shiny wood. A lone figure coils amplifier cords on stage. She hunches over a robin’s egg blue suitcase as she works, her platinum faux-hawk standing at attention. She is Jen Slocumb, a woman of one-thousand haircuts, a singer of a thousand songs, a dreamer of one thousand dreams, lead vocalist for the Auburn-based Martha’s Trouble. The crowd screamed for her.

This isn’t quite what she was aiming for, life in an Alabama town, acting as her own roadie, squeezing in tours when she can arrange a baby sitter, but it’s pretty good. Often very good. She’s scrappy. She’s learned to meet the breaks, the tough ones and the good ones, head on. She’s not where she meant to be, but don’t mistake her for anyone down for the count. She and Rob, her husband and fellow performer, don’t have it all figured out, but they’re working on it. They’re still dreaming.
A few days later, she sits holding a cup of coffee, talking about the new center of her life - her children, her little turning points. There’s Wilson, three, who began writing a new chapter in Jen’s life just by showing up, and her daughter Emery, one, whose birth guaranteed the theme of subsequent chapters. Jen’s Mohawk and pale skin contrast with the electric blue walls of her home-turned-hair-salon. She sets her cup down amid photos of the salon’s employees posing with hair dryers and scissors as Wilson breaks free from a sitter and skitters to her. He places tiny hands on her knees and stares at her soulfully, waiting for her to scoop him into her lap.

She bends low so they are eye to eye. “Hey, baby!” she coos. “Can you give mommy a few minutes?”
And that’s how it is these days, balancing babies and those few minutes, trying to build the dream in sixty-second intervals. It’s heroic in its way. An everywoman story. Love the kids, dote on the kids, but pursue the dream your own mother raised you for. It’s just that Jen’s dream was a little different than most, and before Wilson announced his arrival with a half-dozen positive pregnancy tests, she was immersed in it.
She and Rob lived on the road.
It started slowly around 1998, the year they put out their first CD, Tales of a Foreigner: a gig here, a gig there, a long weekend, a couple of days.
“We were just total newbies on the scene,” Rob said. “We didn’t even know there was a scene.”
With each trip they made more contacts, got better advice, stayed away from their Houston home longer. They were both 25. They’d been married three years.
“Eventually, we decided if we got a van, we could sleep in the van. That’d save us a lot of money on hotels. We had the van about a year. Then we thought, if we had like a motor home or a camper. And then we thought, we’re on the road so much, why are we paying rent on somewhere we’re never at? So we put all our stuff in storage and just went on the road all the time,” Rob said.
It was intoxicating, invigorating, and enmeshed them in a network of musical vagabonds and do-it-yourself artists, all hoping to make it, all working hard. It was wonderful, special, maybe even a tiny bit glamorous when the house lights went down and the music worked, and the timing was so perfect the beauty of it almost hurt, and the audience was so intent, you could just about hear them listening.
Then there were those other times.

KAHLUA ON ICE
Rob and Jen just ended a tour in the South. They’re headed back to the 400-square-foot basement where they flop when they return to Toronto, where Jen grew up.
The night before they stopped in Cincinnati and stayed with friends who noticed the couple didn’t have coats. Their Cincinnati friends offered big, heavy, ugly parkas. They declined. Their friends grew insistent. “We were, like, we don’t need those,” Rob recalled. Finally, the friends made such a fuss, Rob and Jen took the coats if only to put an end to the nagging.
As they neared Cleveland, snow fell gently all around the camper van. A banshee screech broke the silence. The van died. The transmission was on the pavement. As evening fell they were towed into a mall parking lot to spend the night. They turned on the propane heater and five minutes later, it ran out of fuel. The gentle sprinkling of snowflakes turned into blinding tempests of snow. The temperature fell. By morning, everything liquid in the car was frozen solid.
Those coats may have saved them.

Then there was the tour of Arkansas and Oklahoma. They traveled, as always, with their cats, Kahlua and Grey. It was hot and getting hotter. The camper air conditioning only worked when it was plugged in at a campsite. Jen and Rob were sticky and miserable, but their cats were in distress, mouths open, panting rapidly. If they could just find a campground and turn on the air, they could help the cats. But Arkansas seemed mysteriously campground-free. The longer they drove, the worse the cats looked.

Jen performs at a Summer Swing Series concert in Opelika.

It was a kitty-cat emergency when they finally found a campground and plugged in. But the van would take awhile to cool off and those poor cats didn’t look like they could wait. Jen and Rob popped open the ice-filled cooler and put Grey and Kahlua inside.
“You would think the cats would jump out,” Rob says. “But they just set right there.”
Rob likes to tell these stories to underline just how little glamour the road holds. But really, he loved it, still loves it, and misses it and all its grubby glory. They learned to make it work, to shower on the beach in Florida where cities provided showers for swimmers, or to go to the truck stops where for five bucks you could shower in privacy and relative cleanliness – Flying J, the duo reports, has the cleanest showers.
The years on the road created a special camaraderie with fellow troubadours. They were insiders in an exclusive world, with friends all over the country who they saw only occasionally, but with whom they shared special bonds only insiders who are outsiders possess.

“We got to be good friends with this duo from New Orleans,” Rob says. One day during a rare phone call, they realized they were each playing the same club in Davenport, Iowa, in back-to-back dates. They decided to rendezvous at a Wal-Mart parking lot. It was like a family reunion on a concrete beach. They camped there four days, sharing meals and catching up.
But as wonderful as those relationships are, they were never the point.
“We wanted to make it,” Rob said. “We didn’t want to be the next American Idol or the next pop star. We just wanted to make it.”
After two years on the road they put out their second CD The Road Ahead, followed by two CDs in 2002, Sleeping Dogs, and Christmas Lights, the first of their Christmas albums. In 2003 they released a live CD recorded in a small church in New York City, Still. A year later, they made Live at 8th and Rail in Opelika, and then in 2004, they released their most popular album to date, Forget October.
“All of these cuts that I bear are
from the pain of my past
Hunting me into the night.
How my skin crawls from this place.
Will I ever get out of here?
I’ll be OK for another day. Maybe more.
Maybe I’m at the bottom this time.”

These lyrics from the title track of Forget October are in haunting synchrony with the plaintive fragility of Jen’s high notes, the occasional rasp in the low. There are moments when she sounds a little bit like Jonatha Brooks and Dusty Springfield all at once.
She’s the lyricist of the duo, often taking stories from her own life, or the lives of friends and acquaintances. Forget October is about a young woman they met in Virginia.
“She was kind of a mess when I met her,” Jen says. “We played this coffee shop, and she kind of hung around afterwards, talking to me.”
Jen stayed in touch. She and Rob even visited the young woman when she was institutionalized. Her history was wrenching. She grew up in foster homes, a consequence of her father’s suicide, which her mother blamed her for. It happened in October, always her darkest time.
The real story has a happy ending. The young woman got out of the hospital, got a job, fell in love. Jen says she often hears from others about the song. “You’re singing about me,” they write.
“That’s the kind of stuff I love,” she says. “I love being there for people I don’t know.”
Only once have Jen and Rob written lyrics together. They were on a long road trip from Canada to Charleston, South Carolina.
“We were just trying to keep ourselves awake,” Jen said, so they took turns creating lines. The song, on Sleeping Dogs, is called 100 Miles to Charleston.
On stage their creation is seamless.

“There’s just always been a chemistry, even before we were together-together,” Jen says. “It’s almost like when Rob plays guitar, it’s like I’m playing guitar. He always senses where I’m trying to go.”
When the couple started touring, they maintained a home base in Houston, then in Canada, and finally, about three years ago, they moved to Auburn, to be near Rob’s family. But they had no plans to change their lives. The road still owned them.
But something much smaller, yet much, much larger, would soon take its place.
It was during a stay in Auburn when Jen got sick.

“I’m a hypochondriac,” she says. A headache presages a brain tumor, an unexplained ache might be cancer. “Rob knows I’m that way,” she said. But no matter how Rob tried to calm her panic this time, she was sure something was really, seriously wrong.
Rob took her to Auburn Urgent Care. A doctor told her she might have walking pneumonia. He wanted to do a chest X-ray. But first, she had to take a pregnancy test, a routine pre-X-ray screen for women in their childbearing years.
“He comes back and says, ‘So, the test came back positive.’”
“You mean positively I’m not?”
She began to panic. “What do you mean positive? What do you mean?”
“You’re pregnant.”

Her eyes filled with tears. She started to unravel in front of the doctor. She walked out to the waiting room crying so hard she couldn’t catch her breath.
Jen saw the fear rise in Rob’s eyes.
“What did they tell you?”
But Jen couldn’t answer. She couldn’t stop crying.
“You’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”
But she still couldn’t. Not until they reached the car could she choke out the words between sobs: “I’m pregnant.”
“No you’re not,” he blurted. “It must have been a bad test.” The couple went to the pharmacy to pick up an antibiotic prescription along with five pregnancy test kits.
“Every one of them said I was pregnant,” Jen said. Even Rob took one, just to prove the test kits worked. “Our world just stopped.”
All they could think was: “What are we going to do with our music?”

A NEW STREAK
Rob’s family members thought the pregnancy would finally get the couple off the road, force them to live a calmer, safer life. But Rob and Jen were shell-shocked. They could barely speak. Jen fled to Canada, to her family.
Her family helped her see that a child was not the end of their road, just a different road.

Performing at Eighth & Rail with Paul Dow and Jacob Blount.

“You don’t have to change your life to fit your kids into it,” they told her. Children are adaptable. You can love them anywhere. So three weeks after Wilson’s birth, all three went on the road.
“That first year with Wilson touring were some of the best times,” Jen said.
They brought someone along to watch Wilson while they were onstage. It meant an extra expense, but it kept them playing music. But this couldn’t last, Jen realized. When Wilson started school, they’d need a new plan.
During her pregnancy, Jen’s friend Tim Boyd, owner of the now-defunct salon Pompeii in Opelika, suggested she come work with him when she wasn’t on the road.
“I thought it would be cool. I always loved hair,” Jen said.
More accurately, she’s obsessed with hair. In the last two years her hair’s been brown with pink streaks, blond with blue streaks, lengthened with extensions and streaked purple in the back, completely blond, burgundy, dark with blond, styled into a faux hawk, shaved on one side, incised with lines on the side, cut into a mullet, and short short short.
No surprise: She loved the salon.

Then she got pregnant again. This time, the couple knew it wasn’t the end of the road, but it would mean a seriously different relationship with it. They were driving to a gig in the Carolinas when Jen proposed opening a hair salon of her own in Auburn. Her friend Tim’s salon was closing. He could join her at her shop, and because he was a master hairdresser, she could finish her apprenticeship under him while she grew the business.
Rob loved the idea. They kicked around plans, finally deciding they would buy a home and put the business there as well. It was an idea they borrowed from a home business they saw in Nashville. It was the one good thing to come from perhaps the bitterest disappointment of their career.
It was 2006, and Rob and Jen were finally getting their break. A record label in Nashville was interested in the duo, and, at its request, they booked a performance in Nashville for what is called a “showcase.”
The label’s staff showed up for the performance. The following day, Jen and Rob were invited to the company’s headquarters, which turned out to be the owners’ home. There were offices, an upstairs studio, living quarters, and a nursery for the owners’ three-year-old. For four hours, the record company president gave them his complete attention.

Everyone at the label said they loved Martha’s Trouble. It seemed that, finally, Martha would be troubled no more. As soon as Jen and Rob got back from five dates in Spain, the company executive promised, he’d be back in touch to work out the details.
“Finally, it’s going to happen! Finally,” Rob thought. The couple was ecstatic. Absolutely in the clouds.
“But when we came back from Spain, he would never call us. He never replied to emails. He just went cold-turkey silent on us.”
It was devastating. It left bruises.
“It almost feels like that’s been our luck,” Jen says. “Every time we get close to getting something good, it’s almost what we expect now. You see other people out there doing it, and you think, why can’t we?”
Streak opened in the summer of 2007. And while it’s proved the perfect business for Jen, it is not the dream.
Here is the dream: Jen Coates is nine years old, maybe ten, in her bedroom with her friend Jill Wallace. This time, she’ll be Madonna. She’ll belt out La Isla Bonita, and Jill will play the drums. They have all the moves, their own choreography, the cool hand movements. This was their big number, their hit.
“Tropical the island breeze.
All of nature wild and free.
This is where I long to be
La isla bonita.”
But in a way, Jen already lived on La Isla Bonita. Her childhood was beautiful. She was happy. Her family loved her, and she had everything she could imagine: nannies, and horses, room to run, a boat, a pool. The middle child among five, Jen took piano, flute, and horseback. It was an idyllic life in the town of Ancaster, Ontario, a beautiful place with a quaint downtown, a Toronto bedroom suburb but with more elegance than many.

But it would not last. By the time Jen was sixteen, her father’s business was fighting for its life. Jen sold one horse. Her mother put her clothing store on the line. They sunk everything into saving the business. Jen sold a second horse. Her parents nearly broke up under the strain. Jen did what teenagers do: Rebelled against everything. She left school, never to return. And then her parents lost it all, the businesses, the house, everything.
They put what was left in storage and went on the road, deciding, eventually, that maybe Texas would have an answer for them.
Once in Houston with her family, Jen’s dream resurfaced. She heard about a Michigan performance troupe looking for people to help take positive messages to students through song and skits. Jen used a home karaoke machine and made an audition tape.
“It was pretty rough,” she said, but it won her the job.
Only one problem: She had never been on stage before, never even spoken in front of her class as a child. The only stage she knew was the one under the imaginary spotlight in her bedroom when she belted out Madonna songs.
The day of her first performance, breakfast churned in her stomach. “The whole time I kept saying, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ ”
Then in one of those life-lesson moments, Jen walked on stage and made a discovery: The fear was worse than the reality. In fact, the reality was wonderful. “The fear just went away.”
“This is where I belong,” she thought.

Jen sings at Eighth & Rail.

SPINNING AMID THE STARS
When she returned to Houston after her one-year commitment, she knew music was her calling. In 1995 she was booking bands for a coffee house, when her future walked through the door.
Rob had just returned from Richmond, Va., where a band he was in had fizzled. He was back in Houston, where his parents lived at the time, to regroup. And once again, he was looking for a band. A friend introduced the two, knowing of their common musical interests, but for Rob, something unexpected happened.
Standing in the coffee house, he told his friend: “I’m going to marry that girl one day.”

He still can’t explain it. He wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, let alone a spouse. All he really wanted was a career in music. But here he was in a Houston coffee house staring at a women he barely knew sure that she was his future.
He never breathed a word about his feelings to Jen.
She was engaged.
But their musical compatibility was instant. They began performing as a duo, becoming friends, but keeping the relationship strictly business.
Jen’s engagement to her high school sweetheart was a long-distance thing while he finished a degree. But the more she worked with Rob, the more she realized her engagement was in trouble. Rob never acted interested in her, but she found herself drawn to him anyway.
She called her fiancé: “I’m really falling for my guitar player. You need to come see me more.” Almost before she hung up, he was on a plane to Texas.
Still, a few weeks after the fiancé’s visit, she broke the engagement. No matter how Rob felt about her, she couldn’t marry someone if this was the way she was thinking.
And still, nothing between Jen and Rob changed.
One night they were going to learn country dancing with some friends, but at the last minute, the friends bailed. Jen and Rob went anyway. After the lesson, the regular dance began, and they stuck around, talking, and finally, getting up to dance.
They joined the flow of couples spinning and circling around the floor. And that’s when it happened.
“I don’t know if it was him kissing me or me kissing him,” but they stopped in the middle of the swirling couples and kissed for the very first time.
“I’ll never forget it. There were stars in the room and we were spinning.”
Around them couples laughed and teased as they danced by. Jen and Rob had finally found each other.
Jen is 35 now. Rob will turn 35 in December. Still they dream. Still they plan. Still, they’re in love. They’re a little less starry-eyed now. They know the odds against any talented musician really making it. It’s hard to swallow sometime. But they keep on. If there’s any chance at all, they’ll make it happen.
Their new recording came out this summer, an EP called EP. Their newest Christmas recording, This Christmas, will be out soon. And Martha’s Trouble has new members, Jacob Blount on guitar and keyboards, Paul Dow on bass, and David Ytterberg on drums.

It’s Friday afternoon, and the salon is closing. Wilson comes out with a guitar and strums it forcefully, singing You Are My Sunshine. Jen applauds. Emery is rambling through the salon, for once not hanging onto Jen, teething on a necklace.
“She left tooth marks on one of them,” Jen says. But she also provided inspiration for a new line of baby-safe jewelry Jen developed with an artist friend, Vicki Wheeler of Birmingham. The line goes on sale at Giggles and Coos this November. Don’t expect the necklaces to look like baby toys, Jen says. They’re for mom’s sensibilities but too big to choke on, and made with safe materials.
“I’m real excited about it. I love fashion,” Jen says.
But it will never replace music.
“It’s just such a part of our lives. It’s really who we are. We thought about retiring a couple of times, but every time we do, we just can’t imagine our lives without music. Now, it’s who we are as a family.”

Rob Slocumb and Jen always have great stage chemistry.