Local audiences are going to see a lot of Chris Masterson and Eleanor Whitmore on Thursday night. They are both members of Steve Earle's acclaimed band The Dukes, but as a duo called The Mastersons they will open the concert as the warm-up act.
You'll get no sympathy from the two of them, though. They see way more of each other than might be considered healthy. Masterson and Whitmore are married.
"It can be a good thing and a bad thing," said Masterson. "It takes a lot of work. We are constantly around each other, so the highs are highs and lows are lows. We just never shut work off. That's a tricky thing. But we enjoy what we do so we are starting to learn how to do that."
Even their interviews, like this one on speaker-phone during a tour break in Nanaimo, are done together.
"We honestly don't have a lot of time apart," Whitmore said. "There might be a moment or two when I might have lunch with a girlfriend or something when we're back in Austin, but mostly we're together."
They tour together, they are Dukes together, they are The Mastersons together, but perhaps the most intimate thing they do in an artistic sense is write together. It is there, they each said, that the relationship is truly twisted by emotional pressures.
"The big difference between our first record - Birds Fly South - and our new one - Good Luck Charm - is, on the first project we wrote a couple of things together and the other songs we brought together mainly because they were conceived under the same roof. There were some Chris songs and some Eleanor songs kinda written near each other. Now, the way we sing together and finish each others sentences informed a lot of the writing process. We were more collaborative on Good Luck Charm."
The main hurdle to songwriting wasn't domestic connection, said Whitmore, since they took that step because they already discovered they enjoyed spending the bulk of their time together and bouncing music off of each other. What makes it hard for any musician to build material, she said, is the touring process.
"It makes it challenging to be creative," she said. "We were out with Steve for 101 shows last year and we wrote our entire record on the road, then went to California straight after the tour to make the record. But it's a hard business and there isn't much time to take off. And we are really lucky to be able to do what we do together. We used to be in different bands, and that is a lot harder to deal with. You think it's hard being together all the time? Try being apart all the time."
They have some other role models to look to, they said. Fans of gravelly country-folk-rock like The Mastersons play might also know of Whitehorse, a duo in that same genre made up of Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland. Both are successful solo artists, both are members of Sarah McLachlan's touring band, and they put their creative forces into Whitehorse to make better use of their time as a couple.
"They're having a baby! I'm so happy for them. I don't know if that's in the cards for us in the next few years, but they're going to be excellent parents," said Whitmore. "We know them well. We call them our Canadian doppelgangers."
Masterson said musicians who are blessed with as many creative opportunities as they are certainly can't complain. The two of them are second-generation professional musicians, so the processes of composing, recording and touring are their natural state. It's a pleasure to be on the road as The Mastersons or with Steve Earle and the Dukes.
Both acts are in the spotlight on Thursday at Vanier Hall.
