Paste Band of the Week

Paste Band of the Week

Hometown: Johnson City, Tenn.
Fun Fact: everybodyfields founder Jill Andrews acquired a formal Bluegrass education at East Tennesee State University, where one can minor in the genre.
Why They're Worth Watching: Nothing is Okay is the mournful Appalachian band's Ramseur Records debut, and it ably displays the group's distinct and universally poignant compositions.
For Fans Of: The Avett Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Bill Monroe

Fundamentally, the everybodyfields’ genesis was a meeting of musical souls at Methodist summer camp – a less melodramatic Dirty Dancing with heartfelt vocal duets in place of saucy lambadas. Nine years ago, kayak instructor Jill Andrews was going through first-day orientation when fellow counselor Sam Quinn spotted her singing over a Christian tape. “I thought, ‘This is not what I signed up for at all,’” Quinn says. He had joined staff two years prior because of its hippie-friendly reputation. Acoustic guitars are foolproof bonding implements between campers, however, and the pair soon discovered the appealing harmony between his traditional high, lonesome sound and her clear, understated tones.

Back home in Johnson City, Tenn., Quinn, Andrews and dobro crackerjack David Richey built a reputation for themselves as pure instrumentalists, mature songwriters and intimate performers at their favorite Americana bar, the Down Home. “I remember the first time we played there,” Andrews says. “I felt very privileged. I went to the bathroom in the back and thought, ‘I bet Willy Nelson has peed here.”

Playful musings like this might surprise everybodyfields listeners who wonder how the sad-sack writers of joyless lyrics such as, “love’s not a savior/ when you’re messed up,” could ever see the lighter side. Indeed, recent personal conflicts between Quinn and Andrews — who stopped dating before the release of their 2004 debut album, Halfway There: Electricity and the South — almost compromised completion of their latest appropriately-titled LP Nothing is Okay, out today on Ramseur Records.

“We recorded it three times,” Quinn says. “Every time we’d go through it, there’d be so much other shit going around, [I’d think], ‘Whatever, I just don’t even want to listen to this stuff. I don’t know if we want to make this. You’re out, you’re out, I’m not so sure I’m in either.’”

Thematically, Nothing is Okay is worth every month of dysfunctional anguish. Leaving behind previous albums’ exaggerated narratives on Elvis, depression-era woes, and fictional Alabama bars where “men go and forget about their wives,” Quinn and Andrews use the medium that brought them together to open up and communicate honestly. "I’m so grateful, and you’re so tired of me," Andrews sings on “Wasted Time." Then: "Hold me now, and I promise to let go when you leave."

Hope is altogether mocked in ironic, Quinn-drawn cover featuring a rainbow — “a promise from God,” Andrews notes — hanging upside-down from clouds leaking ambiguous brown gloop. The effect is distinctly tongue-in-cheek, as if the everybodyfields know everything’s not so bad after all.

“It’s really been pretty amazing,” says Andrews, who recently quit her job as a mental health worker to play music full time. “I had this woman come up to me at a show we played recently. She said, ‘Young lady, whenever you get tired, just remember, you’re living my dream.’”