music
Encircle Film Series presents:
CRAZYWISE
Shook Twins
with Free Creatures
(Marv Ellis & Emily Turner)
Friday, March 29, 8pm
Hult Center
$28-32.75
All Ages
What if a psychological crisis was seen as a
positive transformative experience?
or
fro
ld
beads
m
a ro
und the
w
Thursday, April 4th, 6:00 pm
Bijou Art Cinemas
492 E 13th Ave
2833 Willamette • (541) 683-5903
Sister
Shock
Co-sponsored by ISPS-US
PHOTO BY JESSIE MCCALL
www.harlequinbeads.com
Q&A discussion following the film
www.encirclefilms.org
SHOOK TWINS HONOR THE GOOD MEN
WITH A NEW ALBUM RELEASE
By Will Kennedy
K
atelyn and Laurie Shook, twin sisters who perform as the Shook
Twins , have been singing together since they were two years old
“in the back of the car driving to grandma’s house,” Katelyn tells me
over the phone.
The sisters grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho. In school, they were
“huge choir nerds,” Katelyn says, “all the way up to first year of
college,” but they didn’t play any instruments until after high school.
It wasn’t long before they were writing songs centered on the sisters’ preternaturally
crystalline vocal harmonies.
Even then, Shook Twins had a pretty low-key songwriting process, which has
continued to this day.
“We just start,” Katelyn says. “We don’t think about it too much. We just show it to the
other one.” The sister who wrote the song “has the most power over the song,” she adds.
Early songs written by Laurie were about finding the light within and not restricting
yourself, Katelyn says. Katelyn’s songs had more of an external, searching quality,
with themes of the open road. These subtle differences say a lot about the unique
personality of each songwriter.
After playing tiny gigs around Sandpoint, the sisters moved to Portland and, over
the course of about 10 years, they’ve become a popular live act in Eugene — performing
their folk rock everywhere from the McDonald Theatre to the Oregon Country Fair.
This time, Shook Twins play their largest local venue yet, the Hult Center’s Soreng
Theater. They’re in town supporting their brand-new album, Some Good Lives.
The album showcases the group’s usual acoustic songwriting, with some faint
through-lines of African highlife music and Joni’s jazzy period. “We love Joni Mitchell,”
Katelyn says, particularly the lyrics and the early, simple stuff.
The record also offers plenty of contemporary production technique, with enough
adult-pop sensibility to fit in nicely on NPR or Austin City Limits. Most of all, there are
the Shook’s voices, clear and true.
The album was partially recorded at Hallowed Halls, an old library building in
Portland, and the music reverberates with space while also feeling solid — like an old
oak desk in a long-neglected room.
The song “Stay Wild,” with a music video playing off the experience of having a twin
as metaphor for different sides of the same person — one wild, one buttoned-down —
may be Shook Twins’ most pop-oriented offering to date.
Lyrically, the sisters wanted to pay tribute to the good men in their lives, from
grandpas, uncles and godfathers to Bernie Sanders — everyone’s favorite grandpa —
on the song “What Have We Done.”
The track “Grandpa Piano” even features actual recordings of the sisters’
grandfather playing piano in the final weeks of his life, and the song “Dog Beach” was
written by the sisters’ godfather Ted, who recently passed away.
With the #MeToo movement, men were getting a lot of bad press. “We wanted to take
the other side of that,” Katelyn says, and to herald the good men that do exist in the world
as part of the healing process, as goal posts or examples of what a good man can be.
Because, after all, it’s about equality, Katelyn says. ■
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M
M A R C H
2 8 ,
2 0 1 9
21