The Staves: 'There is something special about a sibling harmony'

As they get ready to play in Cork and other Irish centres, the Stavely-Taylor sisters talk about their remarkable music

Wed, 16 Mar, 2022 - 08:30

Ed Power

Every time Jessica Stavely-Taylor steps on stage, a tiny part of her wonders if she belongs up there. The feeling immediately passes. But it never quite goes away. For Stavely-Taylor – a third of all-sister indie-folk trio The Staves – it’s been a constant in her journey through music and through life.

“That expression ‘imposter syndrome’. I feel like I didn't hear that 15 years ago, 20 years ago,” says Stavely-Taylor. “It's refreshing to know that other people feel that way. Because I think it’s definitely something most of us have in common. And it's that kind of thing, where you're looking at other people and you think, ‘well, they've got it all figured out, they seem so together’.”

Self-doubt in both the personal and professional realm is a subject The Staves explore on their remarkable 2021 album Good Woman, in particular on the song Failure. As evidence of the dark humour that infuses their music, it’s also the track with which they’ve opened recent concerts. They may very well do so again as they arrive in Ireland this month for a small-but-perfectly formed tour that concludes with a March 28 date at Cyprus Avenue in Cork.

“I’m sorry if I ruined the party,” sing Watford-born Jessica, Camilla and Emily, their luminescent voices intertwining. “And I'm sorry if all the fuss really killed your vibe.”

The vibe is not killed, of course. Good Woman is a collection of effervescent highs and gut-punching lows – a balmy folk-rock comedown with vinegar in its veins. Proceeding from a whisper to a shriek, the trio draw on influences as far-flung as Bon Iver (who produced their second album, If I Was) and Led Zeppelin.

There’s even a marrow crunching heavy metal style opening on Careful Kid – a wrecking-ball dirge written about a self-obsessed former boyfriend of Camilla's who thinks the world revolves around him.

“Someone said it sounded like a cement mixer and it sort of has an industrial crunchy sound – is actually Millie’s voice kind of put through an effect,” says Jessica. “I think it's like a karmic kind of message. ‘Careful kid – if you're running into the road and you're going to get hit’. It's almost kind of finger-wagging. Telling off someone, because, if you're so self-involved it's going to come back.”

The Staves announced themselves to the world not with a roar but with a diffident sigh on their 2012 debut, Dead & Born & Grown. Nearly a decade on, Good Woman captures the sisters at a fraught moment in their lives. Camilla, the youngest of the three, came into the sessions reeling from the end of a long-term relationship in Minneapolis and a move back to the UK from America. Emily, the eldest had a baby. And in July 2018 all three were brought together in grief with the death out of the blue of their mum, Jean, a former teacher, at the age of 66.

That’s a lot of life lived at maximum velocity and you can hear it in Good Woman. With so much turmoil, introducing the record to a live audience has been intense, to put it mildly.

“With the nature of the album and the content of the songs, it is difficult to sing certain things. To get yourself in that space. And to remember that, months or years ago, when you wrote or recorded that song…remembering 'shit I’ve got to play this in front of people now'. Kind of laying your shit there. That can be difficult. It’s never because of the audience. It’s very much in your own headspace.”

Not that The Staves have been living entirely on their own. They’ve been paying attention to the ongoing conversation about women in music and the degree to which they receive credit for their work. This, of course, in the context of Damon Albarn’s suggestion that Taylor Swift didn’t write her own songs.

“People do ask if you write your own material. Which we do. We’ve never co-written. So people do ask and there are times when you sort of think, ‘would you be asking it, if we were guys?’ Is it just the assumption?’ Particularly because we’re vocalists as well. And that’s outside any question of gender. Vocalists very often don’t get credit. because they’re seen as this slightly more decorative, fun little cherry on the top of the serious stuff, which is the drums and the electric guitar.”

As singers, the Stavely-Taylors have an exquisite synchronicity. It’s hard not to be reminded of Noel Gallagher’s assertion, in the recent Bee Gees documentary, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?, that when siblings sing together it’s an “instrument you can’t buy in a shop”.

“There is something special about a sibling harmony,” says Stavely–Taylor. “There must be something scientific about having voices that are very similar, but not quite the same. A kind of – I don’t even know what the word would be? A perfect storm when they’re together. I hear it in loads of groups. The Everly Brothers, for instance. There’s this beautiful sort of intertwined thing that can happen. You don’t know where one voice begins and the other ends.”