July 12, 2022 • 46 mins
If you watched Sister Act 2 and you remember the scene where Lauryn Hill and another student were singing a duet of His Eye is On the Sparrow, you may remember the other singer in that duet as Tanya Blount. She is now Tanya Trotter, half of rock and roll, country soul duo The War and Treaty. I had so much fun talking all things music with her for this week’s episode! Listen in to hear how Tanya found her voice and to hear her share some of her musical favs! For more information about The War and Treaty, visit https://www.thewarandtreaty.com. To check out Tanya’s line of vintage apparel, visit https://www.shelovesvintage.com. Please enjoy this episode from the HER Archives.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh, y'all, welcome back to her with Amina Brown, and
(00:28):
I just want to give y'all a special shout out
all of my listeners. I am seeing y'all when I
go into the back end of the podcast thing, I'm
seeing y'all listening on here. So I just want you
to know you are appreciated, and I want you to
know that I am very excited about the guest we
have in our her living room today. I want a welcome. Singer,
(00:51):
songwriter and half of rock and roll country soul duo
The War and Treaty. Let's welcome Tanya Trotter. Whoo whoa.
I'm so excited to be on this podcast with you today.
I'm so excited, y'all listen. Let me tell y'all. First
of all, I have the opportunity to meet Tanya and
(01:12):
her husband. We were on the road together on the
Together Live tour. Shout out to all of my Together
Live folks that we got a chance to tour with
in twenty nineteen, and I immediately struck up a conversation
with Tanya and her husband talking about television. We just
be doing this for the last the next nine months,
(01:33):
watching series, watching TV exactly they were like giving me
tips on like different shows they had watched, and then
there was some shows we all watched and we talked
about it, like we spent all the time before that
show just talking TV. And of course getting a chance
to One of the things that's a big plus of
(01:54):
being on a tour like Together Live is that you
are on stage while every one performs, and uh, those
of us that are touring artists, that's not always the case,
you know, So getting a chance to be on stage
together and experience each other's performances, which is how I
got a chance to hear Michael and Tanya try to
(02:18):
do the thing. And if y'all haven't heard this music,
y'all need to go do that. Don't go do it
yet because we're about to talk, but after we talk,
y'all need to go do that because it is just
I mean, I've been in that room. We also I
had a chance to perform at Makers Conference um sharing
stage together there and just it's just beautiful. It's just beautiful.
(02:41):
Thank you, and we experienced you and you are incredible.
I mean, there are you know, people use words like Cluchet,
words like incredible, phenomenal. She's so amazing. But you, I
mean just breathtaking that we talk about it all the time,
just how you're able to capture the audience with your
words and they're like holding onto every thing that comes
(03:02):
out of your mouth. And you know, I'm just so
happy that we had an opportunity to experience you and
we all made that human connection that we made during
that tour of time. Yes, y'all, I'm telling y'all, when
the pandemic is over, I don't know where the War
Entreaty gonna be on tour, but I'm just gonna go there,
(03:23):
just uninvited. I'm gonna go there and be like, I'm sorry,
I thought we was doing this together. It's not I
thought we was doing this together. I'm just gonna show
up there because that's that's how I feel about it. So,
first of all, time y'all want you to know that
the War Entreaty as a duo, you all have fans,
and individually you all have fans as well. Because I
was telling a couple of people that I was interviewing
(03:45):
you today and they were so excited. They were like,
oh my gosh, yes, I want to hear everything. I
want to know everything. So Tanya. I want to talk
about the duo of the war and treaty, but can
you tell us a little bit about your half of
the duo. You have been singing, writing songs. You have
(04:06):
also been involved in film. You just had a lot
of different experiences in the entertainment industry. So this is
what I want you to do. Start me out, and like,
if you think of yourself when you were first entering
the beginnings of the entertainment industry, did you expect entering
it then what the music would become? Now? I had
(04:30):
no clue. I started out um in church like most people,
you know, uh, singing on the choir. And my mom
was from Panama, so in my household was gospel music,
it was Calypso music, it was classical music. And then
being from Washington, d C. It was Gogol music. You know.
(04:50):
It was all different kind of plethora of music just
flowing through my household and flowing through my church and
my community. And I just knew that I wanted to
do music. I knew that there was Once I heard
my brother sing one Sunday morning, I think I was
about six or seven years old, I was like, I
want to do this for the rest of my life,
(05:11):
and I didn't know how I would do it or
what avenues I would go about doing it. So I
started doing talent shows and getting in a pageant how
Jackson Talents and Teen Pageant, which was really big, you know,
in the nineties. And I won that pageant, and I
went to high school and study music there and Duke
Gallant and School of the Arts, and from Duke Ellerston
(05:33):
Schooly Yards UM, I went back to Patoma High School,
where I ended up getting a scholarship to Morgane State
University for vocal music and UM. In the process of
doing that, I was at this time seventeen years old
about to inter college and I UM entered this talent contest.
(05:54):
It was called Big Break and the Legendary now in
late grade. Natalie Cole was the host and I performed
on that show. And a record company saw me performing
on that show and they reached out to my school
at the time and they were like, we want to
give you a contract. So I went to New York
(06:14):
with my mom and ended up signing a contract with
a company who was managing Melbynemore. These are people like I,
you know, Pearly Merlby Moore in the back of the
day being on Broadway. I was obsessed with her voice
and her being able to hold this note. So the
thought that Melvine Moore's management company had any deal wanted
(06:35):
to do with me at all, I was like, Yes,
So I signed with them and um and then sister
act too. Opportunity came up, you know, and that was
something that we all kind of just auditioned for, not
knowing what would happen from that. And I did that
and ended up in that movie put out a record,
and right when the record came out, I remember touring
(06:57):
with all the big acts who asked the sem saying
Freddie Jackson, who were also very kind to me. I
remember one day and I was just like, I don't
want to do it this way. I want to do
something different, you know. I likely in teen Price in
Catherine Battle and seen a Turner and Dolly Parton, and
I like all these different styles of music. But I
was stuck in this box of just doing R and B.
(07:20):
You know that at that time it had the Black
music Division and the in our division, and you were
a black artist and you only at your show saw
black faces. But my best friend one of my best
friends was white, and I'm like, well, why can't I
just do music that it's just good music, you know.
And so at that time I told my manager that
I didn't you know, I didn't know what to do.
(07:43):
So we went on and we kept touring and doing
things like that, and we ended up leaving this particular
label and I signed briefly with Sean Colmes a bad Boy,
and that experience was definitely not what I knew I
wanted my career to be, not that it was a
bad experience, and just I knew I wasn't a hip
hop artist. I knew that this wasn't the past for me.
(08:04):
But in that process I learned a lot about the
business and so I left there. You know, they recorded
so much music for me. That's where I started writing
for Shitnis Wilson and I wrote with Heavy D and
a cup of you know, a lot of big name
artists um at that time. So I left, And this
(08:24):
is the funny part, and I decided in the middle
of my career that I wanted to go to hair school. Yeah,
so people like what happened down your blunt? I was like,
you know what, I don't want to do this. I
don't want to do it this way. I'm going through
some kind of spiritual awakening. I don't know what's happening
with me. I'm trying to hear this voice that I'm
(08:45):
hearing everybody talk about since I was seven years old
sitting in the you know, Baptist pews. So I went
to hair school and I did that for about I
would say seven to eight years. I was also a
dibble and dabbled in music where I would kind of
each worship teams and stuff like that. But I knew
that that wasn't it either. You know, I wasn't just
(09:06):
gonna be a worship leader. There was more. And I
could take the experience from worship, the experience from gospel,
to experience from R and B Christian uh my dad
from Newbern, North Carolina. I could take that country experience
that I had sitting on the front porch with my
grandparents drinking iced tea and playing in the pond, you know,
(09:26):
with the frogs and the cows and you know, the pigs.
I could take that country experience and there was gonna
be an opportunity where I could one day mesh all
this together and fast forwarding I've met my husband heard
him perform at this love festival out in law of Maryland.
He was incredible. I mean, the lyrics, everything. It just
(09:48):
like rushed from the stage to where I was in
the middle of the field, and I'm like, who is
this guy who could be this vulnerable with music? Who
could you know? Because that's what I wanted. I wanted
to meet someone who would once again ignite not just
the fire for music in me, but the fire for
life because I lost my sense of life. And we met,
(10:09):
and not right away did we start doing music. Um,
because my brother was trying to record, so I was
working with him at the time doing some stuff and
I asked Michael to write us a couple of songs
for a project that we were gonna possibly do. So
he did that, and um, my brother didn't make a rehearsal.
Michael did some reference vocals to the track. One of
(10:30):
my girlfriends heard the song and was like, do you
guys hear this? You hear what you guys are doing?
And we were like yeah, and we kind of just
brusted off. You know. Six months later we get married.
We don't sing together for three years. So the warr
and treaty didn't happen with music. We just fell in love.
It was like every day we're together, We're like, I'm
(10:52):
just wanting whatever this energy is that he has, you know,
this incredible human being. So we get married and you know,
I find out that he's a wounded warrior and he
starts letting me in on why he writes two songs
as fast as he does and what and as deep
as he does, and and it clicked. We started singing together.
(11:12):
He started letting me into his world, and that was
the birth of the war and treaty. Wow, that was it.
And I knew right away when he started writing these songs.
I was like, I can do music again because it's
honest and I'm not trying to be something that I'm not.
I don't have to, you know, Uh, put on a
(11:35):
mini dress and tossed around in some heels and sing
songs that I don't really like. He gat out just
the Sellot record. I didn't want to do that, and
that's what we did. We we got in our van
without our little baby, and we toured the country coffee shops.
Sometimes two people would show up, sometimes five people would
show up. And I started all over. I started from scratch,
(11:59):
and people thought talking you blunt was dead. I would
read articles about it and people were like, did you
see this? My friends are like, they're saying you're dead.
You have a father record. I was like, I am,
I'm dead to that life. I'm dead to that and
I'm born again in this. So that's my quick spec
of how I got to the war in treaty, you know,
(12:21):
and the spiritual experience that it was, because it was
very spiritual gett into this place. Yeah, I mean, there's
there's two things you said that really hit home to me.
The most ignorant part is because I mean I can
sing enough to like hold a note, but I should
I should really be with others, like an acquire type
of situation. I shouldn't be alone singing, you know. But
(12:42):
because like I don't have that gift, I just always
imagine people who can really sing are just like walking
around their house all the time singing. So my mind
is like, how could these two vocalists like which is
probably why I didn't get the gift. Because if I
was married to some body that could sing like the
Toya sing, like if Oka sing and he could sing,
(13:03):
I feel like I would just be walking around the
house and like just singing random words all the time
for nothing. So I just can't even imagine that. But
I think that's a beautiful part of the story in
that the foundations were the love and the relationship and
then building the ability to be partners in in art
(13:25):
and in business. I think it's beautiful that the foundation
was you all being in love with each other and
walking through life, walking through all of the the ups
and downs that life is going to bring. The other
thing you said that I thought was so important, and
I have given this advice when I've done talks with
college students that are are artists, you know, are performing artists,
(13:46):
and they're always like, I'm about to graduate from college.
You know what should I do? And I'm always like,
you should get a job. And I feel like it's
always like the unsexy advice because I think they're hoping
I'm gonna say you should it go onto it right away,
you should make an album, you should do those things too.
But even you know, you you telling that story, all
(14:07):
of these experiences you had in the industry, and then
you coming to that point where you were like, I'm
about to go to costmtology school, and I'm gonna do that,
and I'm gonna do that, and I don't just do
that for a while, but like that's life, that's those
are those experiences are where you know, for me, the
poems they come from, they come from the life that
(14:27):
you know, we live, whatever that looks like. And I'm like,
sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is
take a break from some of this and just get
you a job that is so true until you can
because your art form it's an energy that's that's like
it's surgy. It pushes through an atmosphere. So whenever you're
putting out art, it's not like a hairstyle where you'll
(14:49):
do someone's hair and it's great for that photo and
when they watch it, it goes away. Music never goes away,
Like people can always find this energy that you put
into this this world. And I'm like, I don't want
to put songs that I don't feel good about into
the world, you know, or energy into the world. So
the best thing I could do was, like you said,
go sit down somewhere until I figured out what is
(15:11):
my energy? You know, who am I? And all of
this because I started so young I started, you know,
record deal at seventeen, right out of high school. You know,
it's just it's just amazing to think about. And I
hope for any of you all listening that are artists.
I think the other thing that you said that really
encouraged me is sometimes as an artist, it's challenging to
(15:35):
balance finding your own voice and honoring your own creativity
while being in the middle of a business as well
and doing what you have to do to take care
of your soul to honor your creative person, even if
that goes against what Air quotes. The business says you
should be at that point, or you should be doing
(15:57):
or you should be sounding like this or that, when really, UM,
so much of it is about you coming to sound
like yourself, you know, and continuing to become you know,
who you are as you grow and experience different things.
I thought that was so powerful. I do have another question,
which is somewhat selfish, because my husband and I also
(16:18):
work together. We have performed together as a duo before UM,
and that was fascinating because we work very differently. I
need a lot of like quiet and you know, jazz
and stuff in order to like write my poems and
my husband as a DJ, as a music producer, like
(16:39):
he could watch a cartoon and get inspired from that,
or watch a stand up comedian, or just grab some
things and make some noise. So when we tried creating
in the same room, we were like, no, we can't
do this. We can't do this like in the same
room like this. So what has it been like being
(16:59):
married to your duo partner? Also, because there are people
that perform together, but they don't have the other part
of their life that they live together. They're not romantic partners,
they're not parenting together. So would have been some of
the lessons you've learned as you and your husband have
navigated that there's not a blueprint for us. You know,
(17:20):
there are no people like can't you get sick with
each other? And don't you need your space? There's none
of that. Like we wake up and whatever the day
is gonna give us, we kind of take it. Sometimes
Michael will say, hey, look, that's a's for hearth and
I'll just pretty much say, okay, maybe we can rehearse
at this time. So that's the lead in it, because
I do more, you know, around the house for the
(17:40):
most part, you know, I'm the person that does most
of that when we're home and we travel with our sons,
so I homeschool him as well. So the creative side
of it is really more so. Michael is the writer.
I write very minimal. I'm from writing on the new
stuff that we're doing. But he'll bring me a bout
of songs until say Okay, I'm thinking about us going
(18:02):
this way with the war and treaty. What do you think?
And I'll say nah, or I'll say yeah, And then
who will start just crafting what we want to talk about,
you know, And we'll have these songs and Michael will
bring them to me and then we kind of just
chop them down. We started with fifty. We may end
up agreeing on twelve to fourteen songs together. But the
(18:22):
balance is, there is no balance. It's really hard when
I hear people say, you know, we try to balance it.
I just don't. There's not one. You know. When I
feel like I don't want to record or I don't
want to sing today, I'll just say to him, I
don't want to do that right now, and he'll say, okay,
let's watch a movie, and here you go. We'll watch
the series for two days, you know, watch the television
(18:44):
theories there or something like that, you know, to break
up the monotony of doing music all the time. So
that's i'll balance, you know. I love that, and I
do feel like, you know, for my husband and I
being being life partners and business wartners as well, it
is this, It is this interesting. I don't I don't know.
I wish I need to come up with a better
(19:05):
word for it, because I feel like, like you're right,
I feel like balance is not the word that I
want to put there. But there's a lot of things
that overlap, I guess, and that experience for us that
there are times we are creating, you know, work together,
and then there are times we're talking about work, but
it's not just talking about business. It's talking about the
(19:29):
part of our hearts that you know, wants to figure
out what we feel like we want to create and
how that affects us even as people. You know. So
to your point, it's definitely not something that's like at
eight pm that just turns off and we're gonna wait
till tomorrow at seven am to continue that. You know, Yeah,
(19:49):
we don't have a balance. It's it's really hard to
to do that. I mean, like now Michael is you know,
recording and doing in the studio. We have a little
studio in our home now since the pandemic hit, so
you know, at any moment we can go in there
and just start creating. And we rehearse with our band
as well here, so you know, we just it depends
(20:09):
on how I feel. I've learned one thing that the
pandemic has taught me, and I've kind of always tried
to live this, but I've now I had to practice it.
It's taking day by day, take every day, every minute,
every second for what it is, you know, and if
you if you have a schedule, then great, you know
you have a a zoom call or a phone call
(20:31):
or rehearsal or show. You take that, and but you
don't plan your whole life around that, you know what
I mean. It's something that you have to do for work.
But my life isn't work, you know, There's so many
other things that fulfilled me throughout the day, and so
I've gotten into this thing where I'm like, Okay, how
can I create this day to be what I wanted
to be? You know, in spite of all the work
(20:54):
that I have to do, and sometimes that's plugging out
and just saying, hey, babe, I can't I don't want
to record today you And then other day days it's like, hey,
look let's do this. You know, I love that. I
love that you brought up that word create in our
everyday life, you know, like, what's the day that I
want to create today, which I think even broadens you
(21:17):
know a lot of times obviously, you know, as artists,
we we think about creativity in that way. But I
have a lot of friends who are like, but I'm
not an artist, and I'm like, but there's a lot
of ways to be a part of creativity that are
in our everyday life. You know, even if you're not
painting or doing choreography or other things that people think
are are outwardly you know, creative, there are ways we
(21:39):
can create joy or create space for memories, and you know,
there's different things we can do like that that also
are really important to life. And I do think this
time of the pandemic has you know, obviously the year
has been you know, trash in some ways, but in
other ways, I think it has helped us, you know,
a lot of us really focus in on what's important
(22:00):
to us and what really matters and sort of like
pearing that down, which I think, you know, is a
good process. Okay, I want to talk about Heartstown. I'm
always curious about how albums get made because I am
(22:22):
not a musician myself, but I'm a big music fan,
you know, So whenever you listen to someone's whole album
in particular, you know, and especially when you're listening to
that from singers who are also writing this music, I mean,
there's something so rich about listening to that. But I'm
(22:42):
always like, oh my gosh, how do you even go
about making an album? I know. I mean, I'm sure
for like singer songwriters musicians it's I don't know if
it's like old hat, But for me, I'm like, as
a fan, I'm like, how do you do this? So
you talked about earlier that sometimes y'all will have bunches
of songs. You might have forty or fifties songs, and
(23:02):
then you're sort of narrowing that down to the album,
Like how does that list of songs become an album?
Like Hearts Town? But we have an interesting process what
we used to do before the pandemic hit again, as
we were touring, so we did you know, the year
before last or I guess it was two thousand nineteen,
two eighteen. We all the songs you're here on Heartstown,
(23:24):
we actually toured with those songs, so we would we
would perform them and let our fans tell us which
songs they loved. So a song like five more Minutes
on Heartstown, we actually been doing that song for a
year and when the album came out, the fans were like,
oh my god, what's so happy? You release five more
Minutes as well as us performing Heartstown, So we tested
(23:44):
them on our fans to see what they wanted to hear.
And not that you make a record based off of
what your fans want to hear, but they're the ones
that have to buy it, you know. And then we
started to notice on the road that people would send
us a lot of messages, you know, through Facebook and
Instagram about their personal lives because we're so open with
(24:07):
of course, Michael has PTSD and I've stuffed from depression before.
We both like to eat, so, you know, and our
skinny people will wait people. So we talk about our
struggles with you know, weight and PTSD, combat being being
a combat veteran and us touring with our our nine
year old now homeschooling. So we took all these different
(24:28):
things that we were doing on stage and we were
talking about them, and the fans just started talking back
to us, you know. So they would Texas and or
email us or whatever and say, I'm suffering from cancer.
You know your song helped me through my treatments, or
I'm going through this with my spouse. Can you all
give us a call to talk about our marriage? And
(24:50):
we two started creating this community of people, you know,
whether they were gay, they were straight, they were Democrat, Republicans,
why Hispanic, whatever they were, they would call us, you know,
and we would respond to them on social media, and
we kind of created this family and we started a
group on Facebook called Heartstown. It's a community probably about
(25:13):
four thousand people now, but it started with nothing, and
they're on they're encouraging each other now and accepting each other.
And when you know, we talk about the moments with
the song five More Minutes where that was you know,
Michael having a PTSD moment where he wanted to die
by suicide, and we talked about that. So you have
a community of people who now no longer are living
(25:35):
in the stigma of having to hide because they are gay,
or having to hide because they may have tried to
commit suicide. You know, two or two or three days ago,
they put it up on in Heartstown and we wrap
these songs around them and it became the album. So
you have songs like five More Minutes, You have songs
(25:57):
like Lonely and My Grief, which we were doing two
of ago before even the social justice Black Lives Matter
actually blew up the way it did, and we were
talking about it because we are in you know, as
African American artists. It's not it's probably a handful of
us that are doing Americana style music. So we had
(26:17):
our challenges as African American artists on the road, you know,
going to some of these places where people treated us different,
or it would just be one black act on the
entire festival of a hundred people, you know what I mean,
hundred acts. So we talked about being lonely in our grief,
you know, lonely in the process of being black people,
(26:38):
and nobody's standing up and saying, hey, why aren't there
more black people on festivals or uh, you know in
American or whatever the kids may be. And we did
it in love. So we put that song on the record,
Hey Pretty Moon, we talked about uh that, We talked
about jealousy and a song you know called Jealousy, And
these songs kind of just came from an honest place
(27:00):
where we are and where we were over the last
twenty four months, and that's how the record came about. Uh.
I love that and just even having experienced some of
the songs on Heartstown Live and just how it's like
rich is the only word I can think of, Tanya
(27:20):
to describe that. But I think I think what's really
beautiful and what's important about the music that the two
of you are making is that it does make people
feel heard and seen and known, you know, even if
they're in the audience and they never may get a
chance to get their story to the two of you,
(27:41):
but hearing the two of you share those stories and
sing those songs, it's making people feel understood. And I
think that is the power of music and of writing.
It's our hope, those of us that are making art
like this, you know, it's our hope that as we're
pouring our role into what we're doing, that that translates
(28:03):
for somebody sitting there who may be going through PTSD,
but they don't even have the words to describe how
that experience is impacting them. And they hear this music
and they're like, there's the language, you know, there are
the words that I couldn't say. And I also have
experienced just a grief that's so heavy it just takes
(28:26):
my speech away almost, And when I hear it come
back to me in a song, it's it's it's suggested
such a beautiful experience for me to think I was
so deep in sadness. I couldn't bring the words to that.
But here comes a musician, Here comes a singer and
a songwriter that can give language to an experience that
(28:48):
we know as human beings. Yeah, yeah, you you nailed it.
And it's really you know, I really live on this
principle that you know, you can't love a person if
you're judging them. You know, you can't if they don't
feel accepted, if they don't feel like you hear them,
You can never really sustain anything, not a relationship, not
(29:11):
a fan base. I call a fanship. Not a fanship
anything with the ship behind it, it can't be established
unless there's some level of respect, love and acceptance and
and and that's what we and honesty, and that's what
we give our fans. You know, we're completely vulnerable with
(29:33):
them and transparent sometimes to maybe our own detriment. But
they what what more can you get? We give our hearts,
We give it all, and there's no we don't hold back.
So yes, okay, I have some music questions that I
want to ask you, Tanya. Maybe you will give the
people some things they can add to their different playlists
(29:56):
on all the places where you can make a playlist.
My first question to you is, what is the first song,
or even if it's a couple of songs, what's the
first song that you remember learning to sing? First time
I learned was a church song. It was called It's
Going to Rain and I can't remember who the artist was,
but I remember singing that song. The first song I sang,
(30:16):
which was like an R and B song publicly, was
I need a banker, no one in the world. It's
a good choice. It's a good choice right there. Yes, Okay,
now you may this, this may be it's not a
hard question, but I feel like when you are an artist,
it's like how can I pick from all these things?
But I know sometimes as a poet, it's not that
(30:39):
I can say I love any of my poems more
than the other. But I go through seasons of time
where there might be one poem that in that time
that's my favorite one to do or to perform. Do
you have a favorite the War and Treaty song right
now that you're like, that's the one I love to sing,
I'm gonna say, off of the Heartstown record, Hey Pretty Moon,
(31:02):
it's a beautiful one. Yes, I love that song. What
is your favorite cover to sing? Well, not cover. I
don't do well with covering songs, but I do. I
love listening to anything elpis Gerald, telephones, um, that kind
of music. You know. I never and I'm a vocalist.
So I listened to a lot of singers and how
(31:23):
they interpret songs and I don't. And I'm like, I
can't ever even try to do it that way. But
I don't. I don't know. I can't really say that
I have one. I can't really say, Oh my gosh,
I'm like, I'm like, for for those of us who
are listening that like can't sing, I'm like, what about this?
What about this. Yeah, tell me tell me what like. Okay,
(31:47):
well i'll tell you. I'll tell you one of mine,
which is not a cover because, like I told you,
I can't be seen really singing publicly by myself. But
the person whose music I sing like it's my concert
when I'm by myself is India Ari. She's like my
person in the shower. I'm like you in my mind,
I'm hitting all the notes. I'm hitting all the same
(32:09):
notes that she's sitting. If somebody else here in the car,
they would be like, that's not you're not doing. That's
not it, that's not it. But in my mind, I'm
like me and d are in here doing an equal duet.
I'm singing just as good. Okay, So I'm gonna say this.
I would have to say, uh Mihellia Jackson, I'm going
way back. Just the way she just attacks a lyric
(32:33):
is insane to me. You know, her interpretation. I would
have to say her, I love it. Yeah, she gets it.
End on the Countryside past Decline. People like that. You
know there are voices are just crazy, you know. Pactic
Cline singing that song is insane, so so good. Okay,
this is a follow up question to that, do you
(32:55):
have a favorite music diva? And I know that I'm
leaving in that definition to be relative because there's a
lot there's a lot of names that could go there.
I mean, that could be Dolly Parton, that could be
Shaka Khan. You know, it could be Reba McIntyre. That's like,
there's a lot of du But do you have a
favorite music diva or a couple of them? And if so,
(33:16):
who would be some of your favorite music divas? I'm
gonna have to say, of course the Queen herself for
Retha Franklin. Um, the late great Padla Bell. You know,
of course, her voices, and she's in her seventies, she's
still slaying of Dolly Parton, of course. UM. I love
Brandy Carlisle, you know she's incredible. Um, Valerie June. These
(33:40):
all newer artists like Valerie June, Brandy Carlisle. Um, uh,
Cindi Lauper, you know my girl. Um. We think the
list just goes dead and alive, you know, on and on,
Sara von Ella Fitzgerald. Uh god, I can't even keep
(34:02):
going the list. The list is extensive, you know, Emmy
Lou Harris, the list is very long, so so many divas,
and it's been interesting to me to think too. I mean,
of course part of this is like, oh, I'm getting older,
but it's interesting to me to think, like, you know,
when I think about you know, I think about like
my mom's generations music, and I'm like, okay, I can
(34:24):
look at their generation and be like, okay, here we're
the divas of that era of music. And then I
think about the music I loved when I was you know,
maybe that like high school into my like early to
mid twenties, and now, you know, we sort of get
to a point when we get in our thirties and
forties that we can then look at the music that
we grew up with. The people that were are contemporaries
(34:46):
that are going to make that diva canon, which has
been like exciting to me to watch, you know, because
when you're young and you're listening to a Wretha, you're like,
oh my gosh, that I mean, here is this diva
of that era. But I wasn't born to get to
go to the you know show and see her do
(35:07):
that in person. Like there's so many times I'm like
I just wish I could, like if I could go
back in time. I want to see her live. I
would want to see Marvin Gay. That's like, I mean,
do you have artists like that and Dave? You know
Sam and Dave, you know all those those cats oldest reading.
Just be able to experience them, you know, in their
(35:28):
prime is insane. I would have just lost all of
my mind everything and the fashions, okay, and let me
I do have one more music question, but I do
need to step in here and discuss the fashions, Tanya,
because you are also about these vintage fashions. Can you
discuss like how how did you come to you already
(35:49):
describe to us how you came to find your voice musically,
and you also have come to find this fabulous and
gorgeous look like when I look at the fashion of you,
so talk about that. What was the process like of
you finding sort of this is my style or how
(36:09):
my style is evolving? Yeah, it evolved from of course
I needed Baker Julie Andrews style short, you know, nineties
fifties pixie cut. And I my mother passed away five
years ago. This will make five years of this past Thanksgiving.
And she was from Panama. My grandmother was a seamstress
(36:32):
in Panama, and my mother's friends were seamstressed, and they
would get all these expensive clothes from the house that
my grandmother and my my mom and they lived, and
they lived with a rich family in the basement, and
my grandmother made clothes for this family in Panama. My
grandmother was from Costa Rica, so she would have these.
My mother would have this beautiful lace and beautiful fabric
(36:55):
growing up, and I remember as a kid, I would
always like certain of things, and she would never just
buy cheap fabric. And if I did come home with
something that was cheap, she was like, you don't want
to get that, because you want to be able to
have this in ten years. And when she passed away,
I um, I got a couple of I wuilt some
(37:17):
of her things, you know, like her sweaters and her purses,
and uh, some of her jewelry. And I was living
in a little town called Albeit, Michigan, and this place
just happened to be a historic area and they had
a ton of vintage store So the home we were
living in was from It was built in the nineteen hundreds,
(37:39):
actually built in nineteen hundreds, and so you had these
this beautiful wood and these beautiful big bay windows and
the hardwood floors and all of the a lot of
the artifacts from that era. And it was like something
inside of me just exploded what I was there, and
I would start going to the even the thrift stores
(38:00):
had this fine fabric that my mother, you know, introduced
me to as a young child. And the detail of
the clothes, you know, the cape coats and the uh
nineteen fifty swing dresses or the nineteen seventies dresses where
the detail was just so incredible, and I fell in
love with the detail. And I was like, this is
(38:22):
like if you watch that movie Lovecraft Country where it's
like a portal and they jump in and out of
the port I was like, oh my god, I just
jumped into the n I'm here and I and something happened,
you know. And I just happened to start dressing like that,
and then got involved in a community, a pin up
community where I could find these clothes overseas and like
(38:44):
London and Amsterdam and New Zealand and where it's very
popular over there for a lot of the girls to
steal dress like this. And that was it for me,
and I was stuck. I was like, this is it.
I want nothing else with my life. I'm stuck. So
the term bens and the cape CODs and the long
opera gloves, things that in that era, you know, from
(39:07):
the forties to even the sixties, people just dressed like
that every day. It wasn't like I didn't see any
of any pictures of my mother or in growing up
when my mother wore tennis shoes. Maybe when we went
to King's Dominion or amusement park or somewhere, or she
went walking with me. But you know things that we
(39:27):
wear every day now that are comments for us yoga
pants and that was for the gym. There was a
specific place for you to wear sweat clothes, you know,
And that was my So that's what I saw. And
I never even saw my mother until she started getting older,
you know, maybe five years before she passed wear pants.
So I went through my whole life sentence woman where
(39:49):
dressed it that just touched below to me, you know,
And but they were fitted dresses. They weren't like there
were the wiggle dresses. There were still sexy dress, you know,
And I fell in love with it. And it's been
what I've am just attracted to My soul is just
attracted to that energy. And when I see it, I'm like,
(40:11):
I gotta wear of this. I have to put this on,
even if I'm the only one walking around looking like
I'm in a costume. It's gorgeous. Like just having seen
your style and of course following you on Instagram and
like seeing all of these amazing styles and all this fashion.
(40:32):
I mean, it's just it's gorgeous time. And I think
that's really, you know, important to you know, and all
not all of my listeners are women, but I know
for a lot of us who are women, it's you know,
finding fashion can be this other place where you get
to find your voice and find you know who who
(40:53):
you are and how you want to express that you
know through your clothing. And yes, girl, you did that. Okay,
thank you. Last question I want to ask you is
when you need some joy, what are your favorite songs
to listen to right now? Oh? Michael wrote this song
called joy, Don't You Go? And it's like a John
(41:15):
and Style song, and heal be not even because he's
my husband. I tell you a story. When I first
met him, he had the CD called Shift and I
bought six c ds. It was like a Christian rock
kind of thing, and I bought six CDs and I
played that record to death, so people were stealing it
from me. I bought so many. They were like, we're
(41:35):
taking it because we're sick of parents. But he's my
favorite songwriter, you know, and I think it's because of
how far in he allowed himself to write. Um. So,
this is a song that song joy, don't you go
um anything by my Hood Jackson. When I want to
feel closer to the universe, when I want to feel,
(41:56):
you know, get my soul into that place. Um Uh.
There's a song called Oceans I can't remember. I think
it's a Hillsong song and it's one of my favorites
when I when I want to feel close to who
I am and what my purposes. I listened to that
song as well. You know, yeah, I love it, y'all.
(42:20):
Thank you to Tanya Trotter for coming on here, inspiring us,
telling us your story, Tanya, getting to hear some of
the music that you love, getting to hear how you
make the music that we love as well. Tanya, thank
you so much for joining me. I will definitely be
letting everyone know how they can follow. But you can
(42:41):
listen to Hearts Town. I'm gonna tell you that right now.
You can listen to Hearts Town. Wherever you listen to music,
go to there. Go to there and listen to it.
And I heard a rumor Heartstown be on Vinyl two
for the people that you know want to be involved
in that. It's a lot of things you can be doing,
but just go to there and listen to Heartstown. Tanya,
thank you so much, Thank you so much for having
(43:02):
me and just being the beautiful life that you are.
I love you to death and life. Thanks again to
Tanya Trotter from the War and Treaty and I'm not playing.
Y'all need to go and listen to that music. You
can check out their website, the War and Treaty dot com.
(43:22):
You can listen to their newest album, Hearts Town wherever
you like to stream your music. You can follow them
at the War and Treaty on Instagram, and you can
follow Tanya at she Underscore Loves Vintage on Instagram. And
of course, don't forget. You don't have to remember all
this in case you're driving or otherwise and disposed. All
(43:45):
of this information will be on the show notes at
Amina Brown dot com slash her with Amina, you can
find notes links to the different things that I talked
to guests about to make sure you check that out.
And I hope you're following me already, but if you're
not follow me at Amina b e E at Amina
be on Instagram, I would love to connect with you.
(44:08):
I would love to engage with you here. Your thoughts
about these episodes you can also find on my Instagram.
There are some different clips and questions they're following up
on some of the content we're talking about on the podcast,
so I'd love to engage with you there. This week's
Give Her a Crown is a shout out to Maraldi
(44:30):
and Naomi Hirabayashi, co founders and co CEO s of Shine,
an award winning self care app and community for people
with anxiety and depression. I used Shine myself, and let
me tell you to know that there is an app
like this with meditation and sleep stories and so much
more founded by two women of color and hearing the
(44:53):
voices of women of color as I meditate or take
some time to call my mind while using the app,
me the world. If you are looking for an app
that centers women of color and encourages self care. I
highly recommend the Shine app. Mara and Naomi thank you
for paving the way for women of color and startups
and for encouraging conversation around mental health and self care.
(45:17):
Mara and Naomi give them a crown. Her with Amina
Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Soul Graffiti Productions
as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in
(45:39):
partnership with I Heart Radio. Thanks for listening and don't
forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
Oh, y'all, welcome back to her with Amina Brown, and
(00:28):
I just want to give y'all a special shout out
all of my listeners. I am seeing y'all when I
go into the back end of the podcast thing, I'm
seeing y'all listening on here. So I just want you
to know you are appreciated, and I want you to
know that I am very excited about the guest we
have in our her living room today. I want a welcome. Singer,
(00:51):
songwriter and half of rock and roll country soul duo
The War and Treaty. Let's welcome Tanya Trotter. Whoo whoa.
I'm so excited to be on this podcast with you today.
I'm so excited, y'all listen. Let me tell y'all. First
of all, I have the opportunity to meet Tanya and
(01:12):
her husband. We were on the road together on the
Together Live tour. Shout out to all of my Together
Live folks that we got a chance to tour with
in twenty nineteen, and I immediately struck up a conversation
with Tanya and her husband talking about television. We just
be doing this for the last the next nine months,
(01:33):
watching series, watching TV exactly they were like giving me
tips on like different shows they had watched, and then
there was some shows we all watched and we talked
about it, like we spent all the time before that
show just talking TV. And of course getting a chance
to One of the things that's a big plus of
(01:54):
being on a tour like Together Live is that you
are on stage while every one performs, and uh, those
of us that are touring artists, that's not always the case,
you know, So getting a chance to be on stage
together and experience each other's performances, which is how I
got a chance to hear Michael and Tanya try to
(02:18):
do the thing. And if y'all haven't heard this music,
y'all need to go do that. Don't go do it
yet because we're about to talk, but after we talk,
y'all need to go do that because it is just
I mean, I've been in that room. We also I
had a chance to perform at Makers Conference um sharing
stage together there and just it's just beautiful. It's just beautiful.
(02:41):
Thank you, and we experienced you and you are incredible.
I mean, there are you know, people use words like Cluchet,
words like incredible, phenomenal. She's so amazing. But you, I
mean just breathtaking that we talk about it all the time,
just how you're able to capture the audience with your
words and they're like holding onto every thing that comes
(03:02):
out of your mouth. And you know, I'm just so
happy that we had an opportunity to experience you and
we all made that human connection that we made during
that tour of time. Yes, y'all, I'm telling y'all, when
the pandemic is over, I don't know where the War
Entreaty gonna be on tour, but I'm just gonna go there,
(03:23):
just uninvited. I'm gonna go there and be like, I'm sorry,
I thought we was doing this together. It's not I
thought we was doing this together. I'm just gonna show
up there because that's that's how I feel about it. So,
first of all, time y'all want you to know that
the War Entreaty as a duo, you all have fans,
and individually you all have fans as well. Because I
was telling a couple of people that I was interviewing
(03:45):
you today and they were so excited. They were like,
oh my gosh, yes, I want to hear everything. I
want to know everything. So Tanya. I want to talk
about the duo of the war and treaty, but can
you tell us a little bit about your half of
the duo. You have been singing, writing songs. You have
(04:06):
also been involved in film. You just had a lot
of different experiences in the entertainment industry. So this is
what I want you to do. Start me out, and like,
if you think of yourself when you were first entering
the beginnings of the entertainment industry, did you expect entering
it then what the music would become? Now? I had
(04:30):
no clue. I started out um in church like most people,
you know, uh, singing on the choir. And my mom
was from Panama, so in my household was gospel music,
it was Calypso music, it was classical music. And then
being from Washington, d C. It was Gogol music. You know.
(04:50):
It was all different kind of plethora of music just
flowing through my household and flowing through my church and
my community. And I just knew that I wanted to
do music. I knew that there was Once I heard
my brother sing one Sunday morning, I think I was
about six or seven years old, I was like, I
want to do this for the rest of my life,
(05:11):
and I didn't know how I would do it or
what avenues I would go about doing it. So I
started doing talent shows and getting in a pageant how
Jackson Talents and Teen Pageant, which was really big, you know,
in the nineties. And I won that pageant, and I
went to high school and study music there and Duke
Gallant and School of the Arts, and from Duke Ellerston
(05:33):
Schooly Yards UM, I went back to Patoma High School,
where I ended up getting a scholarship to Morgane State
University for vocal music and UM. In the process of
doing that, I was at this time seventeen years old
about to inter college and I UM entered this talent contest.
(05:54):
It was called Big Break and the Legendary now in
late grade. Natalie Cole was the host and I performed
on that show. And a record company saw me performing
on that show and they reached out to my school
at the time and they were like, we want to
give you a contract. So I went to New York
(06:14):
with my mom and ended up signing a contract with
a company who was managing Melbynemore. These are people like I,
you know, Pearly Merlby Moore in the back of the
day being on Broadway. I was obsessed with her voice
and her being able to hold this note. So the
thought that Melvine Moore's management company had any deal wanted
(06:35):
to do with me at all, I was like, Yes,
So I signed with them and um and then sister
act too. Opportunity came up, you know, and that was
something that we all kind of just auditioned for, not
knowing what would happen from that. And I did that
and ended up in that movie put out a record,
and right when the record came out, I remember touring
(06:57):
with all the big acts who asked the sem saying
Freddie Jackson, who were also very kind to me. I
remember one day and I was just like, I don't
want to do it this way. I want to do
something different, you know. I likely in teen Price in
Catherine Battle and seen a Turner and Dolly Parton, and
I like all these different styles of music. But I
was stuck in this box of just doing R and B.
(07:20):
You know that at that time it had the Black
music Division and the in our division, and you were
a black artist and you only at your show saw
black faces. But my best friend one of my best
friends was white, and I'm like, well, why can't I
just do music that it's just good music, you know.
And so at that time I told my manager that
I didn't you know, I didn't know what to do.
(07:43):
So we went on and we kept touring and doing
things like that, and we ended up leaving this particular
label and I signed briefly with Sean Colmes a bad Boy,
and that experience was definitely not what I knew I
wanted my career to be, not that it was a
bad experience, and just I knew I wasn't a hip
hop artist. I knew that this wasn't the past for me.
(08:04):
But in that process I learned a lot about the
business and so I left there. You know, they recorded
so much music for me. That's where I started writing
for Shitnis Wilson and I wrote with Heavy D and
a cup of you know, a lot of big name
artists um at that time. So I left, And this
(08:24):
is the funny part, and I decided in the middle
of my career that I wanted to go to hair school. Yeah,
so people like what happened down your blunt? I was like,
you know what, I don't want to do this. I
don't want to do it this way. I'm going through
some kind of spiritual awakening. I don't know what's happening
with me. I'm trying to hear this voice that I'm
(08:45):
hearing everybody talk about since I was seven years old
sitting in the you know, Baptist pews. So I went
to hair school and I did that for about I
would say seven to eight years. I was also a
dibble and dabbled in music where I would kind of
each worship teams and stuff like that. But I knew
that that wasn't it either. You know, I wasn't just
(09:06):
gonna be a worship leader. There was more. And I
could take the experience from worship, the experience from gospel,
to experience from R and B Christian uh my dad
from Newbern, North Carolina. I could take that country experience
that I had sitting on the front porch with my
grandparents drinking iced tea and playing in the pond, you know,
(09:26):
with the frogs and the cows and you know, the pigs.
I could take that country experience and there was gonna
be an opportunity where I could one day mesh all
this together and fast forwarding I've met my husband heard
him perform at this love festival out in law of Maryland.
He was incredible. I mean, the lyrics, everything. It just
(09:48):
like rushed from the stage to where I was in
the middle of the field, and I'm like, who is
this guy who could be this vulnerable with music? Who
could you know? Because that's what I wanted. I wanted
to meet someone who would once again ignite not just
the fire for music in me, but the fire for
life because I lost my sense of life. And we met,
(10:09):
and not right away did we start doing music. Um,
because my brother was trying to record, so I was
working with him at the time doing some stuff and
I asked Michael to write us a couple of songs
for a project that we were gonna possibly do. So
he did that, and um, my brother didn't make a rehearsal.
Michael did some reference vocals to the track. One of
(10:30):
my girlfriends heard the song and was like, do you
guys hear this? You hear what you guys are doing?
And we were like yeah, and we kind of just
brusted off. You know. Six months later we get married.
We don't sing together for three years. So the warr
and treaty didn't happen with music. We just fell in love.
It was like every day we're together, We're like, I'm
(10:52):
just wanting whatever this energy is that he has, you know,
this incredible human being. So we get married and you know,
I find out that he's a wounded warrior and he
starts letting me in on why he writes two songs
as fast as he does and what and as deep
as he does, and and it clicked. We started singing together.
(11:12):
He started letting me into his world, and that was
the birth of the war and treaty. Wow, that was it.
And I knew right away when he started writing these songs.
I was like, I can do music again because it's
honest and I'm not trying to be something that I'm not.
I don't have to, you know, Uh, put on a
(11:35):
mini dress and tossed around in some heels and sing
songs that I don't really like. He gat out just
the Sellot record. I didn't want to do that, and
that's what we did. We we got in our van
without our little baby, and we toured the country coffee shops.
Sometimes two people would show up, sometimes five people would
show up. And I started all over. I started from scratch,
(11:59):
and people thought talking you blunt was dead. I would
read articles about it and people were like, did you
see this? My friends are like, they're saying you're dead.
You have a father record. I was like, I am,
I'm dead to that life. I'm dead to that and
I'm born again in this. So that's my quick spec
of how I got to the war in treaty, you know,
(12:21):
and the spiritual experience that it was, because it was
very spiritual gett into this place. Yeah, I mean, there's
there's two things you said that really hit home to me.
The most ignorant part is because I mean I can
sing enough to like hold a note, but I should
I should really be with others, like an acquire type
of situation. I shouldn't be alone singing, you know. But
(12:42):
because like I don't have that gift, I just always
imagine people who can really sing are just like walking
around their house all the time singing. So my mind
is like, how could these two vocalists like which is
probably why I didn't get the gift. Because if I
was married to some body that could sing like the
Toya sing, like if Oka sing and he could sing,
(13:03):
I feel like I would just be walking around the
house and like just singing random words all the time
for nothing. So I just can't even imagine that. But
I think that's a beautiful part of the story in
that the foundations were the love and the relationship and
then building the ability to be partners in in art
(13:25):
and in business. I think it's beautiful that the foundation
was you all being in love with each other and
walking through life, walking through all of the the ups
and downs that life is going to bring. The other
thing you said that I thought was so important, and
I have given this advice when I've done talks with
college students that are are artists, you know, are performing artists,
(13:46):
and they're always like, I'm about to graduate from college.
You know what should I do? And I'm always like,
you should get a job. And I feel like it's
always like the unsexy advice because I think they're hoping
I'm gonna say you should it go onto it right away,
you should make an album, you should do those things too.
But even you know, you you telling that story, all
(14:07):
of these experiences you had in the industry, and then
you coming to that point where you were like, I'm
about to go to costmtology school, and I'm gonna do that,
and I'm gonna do that, and I don't just do
that for a while, but like that's life, that's those
are those experiences are where you know, for me, the
poems they come from, they come from the life that
(14:27):
you know, we live, whatever that looks like. And I'm like,
sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is
take a break from some of this and just get
you a job that is so true until you can
because your art form it's an energy that's that's like
it's surgy. It pushes through an atmosphere. So whenever you're
putting out art, it's not like a hairstyle where you'll
(14:49):
do someone's hair and it's great for that photo and
when they watch it, it goes away. Music never goes away,
Like people can always find this energy that you put
into this this world. And I'm like, I don't want
to put songs that I don't feel good about into
the world, you know, or energy into the world. So
the best thing I could do was, like you said,
go sit down somewhere until I figured out what is
(15:11):
my energy? You know, who am I? And all of
this because I started so young I started, you know,
record deal at seventeen, right out of high school. You know,
it's just it's just amazing to think about. And I
hope for any of you all listening that are artists.
I think the other thing that you said that really
encouraged me is sometimes as an artist, it's challenging to
(15:35):
balance finding your own voice and honoring your own creativity
while being in the middle of a business as well
and doing what you have to do to take care
of your soul to honor your creative person, even if
that goes against what Air quotes. The business says you
should be at that point, or you should be doing
(15:57):
or you should be sounding like this or that, when really, UM,
so much of it is about you coming to sound
like yourself, you know, and continuing to become you know,
who you are as you grow and experience different things.
I thought that was so powerful. I do have another question,
which is somewhat selfish, because my husband and I also
(16:18):
work together. We have performed together as a duo before UM,
and that was fascinating because we work very differently. I
need a lot of like quiet and you know, jazz
and stuff in order to like write my poems and
my husband as a DJ, as a music producer, like
(16:39):
he could watch a cartoon and get inspired from that,
or watch a stand up comedian, or just grab some
things and make some noise. So when we tried creating
in the same room, we were like, no, we can't
do this. We can't do this like in the same
room like this. So what has it been like being
(16:59):
married to your duo partner? Also, because there are people
that perform together, but they don't have the other part
of their life that they live together. They're not romantic partners,
they're not parenting together. So would have been some of
the lessons you've learned as you and your husband have
navigated that there's not a blueprint for us. You know,
(17:20):
there are no people like can't you get sick with
each other? And don't you need your space? There's none
of that. Like we wake up and whatever the day
is gonna give us, we kind of take it. Sometimes
Michael will say, hey, look, that's a's for hearth and
I'll just pretty much say, okay, maybe we can rehearse
at this time. So that's the lead in it, because
I do more, you know, around the house for the
(17:40):
most part, you know, I'm the person that does most
of that when we're home and we travel with our sons,
so I homeschool him as well. So the creative side
of it is really more so. Michael is the writer.
I write very minimal. I'm from writing on the new
stuff that we're doing. But he'll bring me a bout
of songs until say Okay, I'm thinking about us going
(18:02):
this way with the war and treaty. What do you think?
And I'll say nah, or I'll say yeah, And then
who will start just crafting what we want to talk about,
you know, And we'll have these songs and Michael will
bring them to me and then we kind of just
chop them down. We started with fifty. We may end
up agreeing on twelve to fourteen songs together. But the
(18:22):
balance is, there is no balance. It's really hard when
I hear people say, you know, we try to balance it.
I just don't. There's not one. You know. When I
feel like I don't want to record or I don't
want to sing today, I'll just say to him, I
don't want to do that right now, and he'll say, okay,
let's watch a movie, and here you go. We'll watch
the series for two days, you know, watch the television
(18:44):
theories there or something like that, you know, to break
up the monotony of doing music all the time. So
that's i'll balance, you know. I love that, and I
do feel like, you know, for my husband and I
being being life partners and business wartners as well, it
is this, It is this interesting. I don't I don't know.
I wish I need to come up with a better
(19:05):
word for it, because I feel like, like you're right,
I feel like balance is not the word that I
want to put there. But there's a lot of things
that overlap, I guess, and that experience for us that
there are times we are creating, you know, work together,
and then there are times we're talking about work, but
it's not just talking about business. It's talking about the
(19:29):
part of our hearts that you know, wants to figure
out what we feel like we want to create and
how that affects us even as people. You know. So
to your point, it's definitely not something that's like at
eight pm that just turns off and we're gonna wait
till tomorrow at seven am to continue that. You know, Yeah,
(19:49):
we don't have a balance. It's it's really hard to
to do that. I mean, like now Michael is you know,
recording and doing in the studio. We have a little
studio in our home now since the pandemic hit, so
you know, at any moment we can go in there
and just start creating. And we rehearse with our band
as well here, so you know, we just it depends
(20:09):
on how I feel. I've learned one thing that the
pandemic has taught me, and I've kind of always tried
to live this, but I've now I had to practice it.
It's taking day by day, take every day, every minute,
every second for what it is, you know, and if
you if you have a schedule, then great, you know
you have a a zoom call or a phone call
(20:31):
or rehearsal or show. You take that, and but you
don't plan your whole life around that, you know what
I mean. It's something that you have to do for work.
But my life isn't work, you know, There's so many
other things that fulfilled me throughout the day, and so
I've gotten into this thing where I'm like, Okay, how
can I create this day to be what I wanted
to be? You know, in spite of all the work
(20:54):
that I have to do, and sometimes that's plugging out
and just saying, hey, babe, I can't I don't want
to record today you And then other day days it's like, hey,
look let's do this. You know, I love that. I
love that you brought up that word create in our
everyday life, you know, like, what's the day that I
want to create today, which I think even broadens you
(21:17):
know a lot of times obviously, you know, as artists,
we we think about creativity in that way. But I
have a lot of friends who are like, but I'm
not an artist, and I'm like, but there's a lot
of ways to be a part of creativity that are
in our everyday life. You know, even if you're not
painting or doing choreography or other things that people think
are are outwardly you know, creative, there are ways we
(21:39):
can create joy or create space for memories, and you know,
there's different things we can do like that that also
are really important to life. And I do think this
time of the pandemic has you know, obviously the year
has been you know, trash in some ways, but in
other ways, I think it has helped us, you know,
a lot of us really focus in on what's important
(22:00):
to us and what really matters and sort of like
pearing that down, which I think, you know, is a
good process. Okay, I want to talk about Heartstown. I'm
always curious about how albums get made because I am
(22:22):
not a musician myself, but I'm a big music fan,
you know, So whenever you listen to someone's whole album
in particular, you know, and especially when you're listening to
that from singers who are also writing this music, I mean,
there's something so rich about listening to that. But I'm
(22:42):
always like, oh my gosh, how do you even go
about making an album? I know. I mean, I'm sure
for like singer songwriters musicians it's I don't know if
it's like old hat, But for me, I'm like, as
a fan, I'm like, how do you do this? So
you talked about earlier that sometimes y'all will have bunches
of songs. You might have forty or fifties songs, and
(23:02):
then you're sort of narrowing that down to the album,
Like how does that list of songs become an album?
Like Hearts Town? But we have an interesting process what
we used to do before the pandemic hit again, as
we were touring, so we did you know, the year
before last or I guess it was two thousand nineteen,
two eighteen. We all the songs you're here on Heartstown,
(23:24):
we actually toured with those songs, so we would we
would perform them and let our fans tell us which
songs they loved. So a song like five more Minutes
on Heartstown, we actually been doing that song for a
year and when the album came out, the fans were like,
oh my god, what's so happy? You release five more
Minutes as well as us performing Heartstown, So we tested
(23:44):
them on our fans to see what they wanted to hear.
And not that you make a record based off of
what your fans want to hear, but they're the ones
that have to buy it, you know. And then we
started to notice on the road that people would send
us a lot of messages, you know, through Facebook and
Instagram about their personal lives because we're so open with
(24:07):
of course, Michael has PTSD and I've stuffed from depression before.
We both like to eat, so, you know, and our
skinny people will wait people. So we talk about our
struggles with you know, weight and PTSD, combat being being
a combat veteran and us touring with our our nine
year old now homeschooling. So we took all these different
(24:28):
things that we were doing on stage and we were
talking about them, and the fans just started talking back
to us, you know. So they would Texas and or
email us or whatever and say, I'm suffering from cancer.
You know your song helped me through my treatments, or
I'm going through this with my spouse. Can you all
give us a call to talk about our marriage? And
(24:50):
we two started creating this community of people, you know,
whether they were gay, they were straight, they were Democrat, Republicans,
why Hispanic, whatever they were, they would call us, you know,
and we would respond to them on social media, and
we kind of created this family and we started a
group on Facebook called Heartstown. It's a community probably about
(25:13):
four thousand people now, but it started with nothing, and
they're on they're encouraging each other now and accepting each other.
And when you know, we talk about the moments with
the song five More Minutes where that was you know,
Michael having a PTSD moment where he wanted to die
by suicide, and we talked about that. So you have
a community of people who now no longer are living
(25:35):
in the stigma of having to hide because they are gay,
or having to hide because they may have tried to
commit suicide. You know, two or two or three days ago,
they put it up on in Heartstown and we wrap
these songs around them and it became the album. So
you have songs like five More Minutes, You have songs
(25:57):
like Lonely and My Grief, which we were doing two
of ago before even the social justice Black Lives Matter
actually blew up the way it did, and we were
talking about it because we are in you know, as
African American artists. It's not it's probably a handful of
us that are doing Americana style music. So we had
(26:17):
our challenges as African American artists on the road, you know,
going to some of these places where people treated us different,
or it would just be one black act on the
entire festival of a hundred people, you know what I mean,
hundred acts. So we talked about being lonely in our grief,
you know, lonely in the process of being black people,
(26:38):
and nobody's standing up and saying, hey, why aren't there
more black people on festivals or uh, you know in
American or whatever the kids may be. And we did
it in love. So we put that song on the record,
Hey Pretty Moon, we talked about uh that, We talked
about jealousy and a song you know called Jealousy, And
these songs kind of just came from an honest place
(27:00):
where we are and where we were over the last
twenty four months, and that's how the record came about. Uh.
I love that and just even having experienced some of
the songs on Heartstown Live and just how it's like
rich is the only word I can think of, Tanya
(27:20):
to describe that. But I think I think what's really
beautiful and what's important about the music that the two
of you are making is that it does make people
feel heard and seen and known, you know, even if
they're in the audience and they never may get a
chance to get their story to the two of you,
(27:41):
but hearing the two of you share those stories and
sing those songs, it's making people feel understood. And I
think that is the power of music and of writing.
It's our hope, those of us that are making art
like this, you know, it's our hope that as we're
pouring our role into what we're doing, that that translates
(28:03):
for somebody sitting there who may be going through PTSD,
but they don't even have the words to describe how
that experience is impacting them. And they hear this music
and they're like, there's the language, you know, there are
the words that I couldn't say. And I also have
experienced just a grief that's so heavy it just takes
(28:26):
my speech away almost, And when I hear it come
back to me in a song, it's it's it's suggested
such a beautiful experience for me to think I was
so deep in sadness. I couldn't bring the words to that.
But here comes a musician, Here comes a singer and
a songwriter that can give language to an experience that
(28:48):
we know as human beings. Yeah, yeah, you you nailed it.
And it's really you know, I really live on this
principle that you know, you can't love a person if
you're judging them. You know, you can't if they don't
feel accepted, if they don't feel like you hear them,
You can never really sustain anything, not a relationship, not
(29:11):
a fan base. I call a fanship. Not a fanship
anything with the ship behind it, it can't be established
unless there's some level of respect, love and acceptance and
and and that's what we and honesty, and that's what
we give our fans. You know, we're completely vulnerable with
(29:33):
them and transparent sometimes to maybe our own detriment. But
they what what more can you get? We give our hearts,
We give it all, and there's no we don't hold back.
So yes, okay, I have some music questions that I
want to ask you, Tanya. Maybe you will give the
people some things they can add to their different playlists
(29:56):
on all the places where you can make a playlist.
My first question to you is, what is the first song,
or even if it's a couple of songs, what's the
first song that you remember learning to sing? First time
I learned was a church song. It was called It's
Going to Rain and I can't remember who the artist was,
but I remember singing that song. The first song I sang,
(30:16):
which was like an R and B song publicly, was
I need a banker, no one in the world. It's
a good choice. It's a good choice right there. Yes, Okay,
now you may this, this may be it's not a
hard question, but I feel like when you are an artist,
it's like how can I pick from all these things?
But I know sometimes as a poet, it's not that
(30:39):
I can say I love any of my poems more
than the other. But I go through seasons of time
where there might be one poem that in that time
that's my favorite one to do or to perform. Do
you have a favorite the War and Treaty song right
now that you're like, that's the one I love to sing,
I'm gonna say, off of the Heartstown record, Hey Pretty Moon,
(31:02):
it's a beautiful one. Yes, I love that song. What
is your favorite cover to sing? Well, not cover. I
don't do well with covering songs, but I do. I
love listening to anything elpis Gerald, telephones, um, that kind
of music. You know. I never and I'm a vocalist.
So I listened to a lot of singers and how
(31:23):
they interpret songs and I don't. And I'm like, I
can't ever even try to do it that way. But
I don't. I don't know. I can't really say that
I have one. I can't really say, Oh my gosh,
I'm like, I'm like, for for those of us who
are listening that like can't sing, I'm like, what about this?
What about this. Yeah, tell me tell me what like. Okay,
(31:47):
well i'll tell you. I'll tell you one of mine,
which is not a cover because, like I told you,
I can't be seen really singing publicly by myself. But
the person whose music I sing like it's my concert
when I'm by myself is India Ari. She's like my
person in the shower. I'm like you in my mind,
I'm hitting all the notes. I'm hitting all the same
(32:09):
notes that she's sitting. If somebody else here in the car,
they would be like, that's not you're not doing. That's
not it, that's not it. But in my mind, I'm
like me and d are in here doing an equal duet.
I'm singing just as good. Okay, So I'm gonna say this.
I would have to say, uh Mihellia Jackson, I'm going
way back. Just the way she just attacks a lyric
(32:33):
is insane to me. You know, her interpretation. I would
have to say her, I love it. Yeah, she gets it.
End on the Countryside past Decline. People like that. You
know there are voices are just crazy, you know. Pactic
Cline singing that song is insane, so so good. Okay,
this is a follow up question to that, do you
(32:55):
have a favorite music diva? And I know that I'm
leaving in that definition to be relative because there's a
lot there's a lot of names that could go there.
I mean, that could be Dolly Parton, that could be
Shaka Khan. You know, it could be Reba McIntyre. That's like,
there's a lot of du But do you have a
favorite music diva or a couple of them? And if so,
(33:16):
who would be some of your favorite music divas? I'm
gonna have to say, of course the Queen herself for
Retha Franklin. Um, the late great Padla Bell. You know,
of course, her voices, and she's in her seventies, she's
still slaying of Dolly Parton, of course. UM. I love
Brandy Carlisle, you know she's incredible. Um, Valerie June. These
(33:40):
all newer artists like Valerie June, Brandy Carlisle. Um, uh,
Cindi Lauper, you know my girl. Um. We think the
list just goes dead and alive, you know, on and on,
Sara von Ella Fitzgerald. Uh god, I can't even keep
(34:02):
going the list. The list is extensive, you know, Emmy
Lou Harris, the list is very long, so so many divas,
and it's been interesting to me to think too. I mean,
of course part of this is like, oh, I'm getting older,
but it's interesting to me to think, like, you know,
when I think about you know, I think about like
my mom's generations music, and I'm like, okay, I can
(34:24):
look at their generation and be like, okay, here we're
the divas of that era of music. And then I
think about the music I loved when I was you know,
maybe that like high school into my like early to
mid twenties, and now, you know, we sort of get
to a point when we get in our thirties and
forties that we can then look at the music that
we grew up with. The people that were are contemporaries
(34:46):
that are going to make that diva canon, which has
been like exciting to me to watch, you know, because
when you're young and you're listening to a Wretha, you're like,
oh my gosh, that I mean, here is this diva
of that era. But I wasn't born to get to
go to the you know show and see her do
(35:07):
that in person. Like there's so many times I'm like
I just wish I could, like if I could go
back in time. I want to see her live. I
would want to see Marvin Gay. That's like, I mean,
do you have artists like that and Dave? You know
Sam and Dave, you know all those those cats oldest reading.
Just be able to experience them, you know, in their
(35:28):
prime is insane. I would have just lost all of
my mind everything and the fashions, okay, and let me
I do have one more music question, but I do
need to step in here and discuss the fashions, Tanya,
because you are also about these vintage fashions. Can you
discuss like how how did you come to you already
(35:49):
describe to us how you came to find your voice musically,
and you also have come to find this fabulous and
gorgeous look like when I look at the fashion of you,
so talk about that. What was the process like of
you finding sort of this is my style or how
(36:09):
my style is evolving? Yeah, it evolved from of course
I needed Baker Julie Andrews style short, you know, nineties
fifties pixie cut. And I my mother passed away five
years ago. This will make five years of this past Thanksgiving.
And she was from Panama. My grandmother was a seamstress
(36:32):
in Panama, and my mother's friends were seamstressed, and they
would get all these expensive clothes from the house that
my grandmother and my my mom and they lived, and
they lived with a rich family in the basement, and
my grandmother made clothes for this family in Panama. My
grandmother was from Costa Rica, so she would have these.
My mother would have this beautiful lace and beautiful fabric
(36:55):
growing up, and I remember as a kid, I would
always like certain of things, and she would never just
buy cheap fabric. And if I did come home with
something that was cheap, she was like, you don't want
to get that, because you want to be able to
have this in ten years. And when she passed away,
I um, I got a couple of I wuilt some
(37:17):
of her things, you know, like her sweaters and her purses,
and uh, some of her jewelry. And I was living
in a little town called Albeit, Michigan, and this place
just happened to be a historic area and they had
a ton of vintage store So the home we were
living in was from It was built in the nineteen hundreds,
(37:39):
actually built in nineteen hundreds, and so you had these
this beautiful wood and these beautiful big bay windows and
the hardwood floors and all of the a lot of
the artifacts from that era. And it was like something
inside of me just exploded what I was there, and
I would start going to the even the thrift stores
(38:00):
had this fine fabric that my mother, you know, introduced
me to as a young child. And the detail of
the clothes, you know, the cape coats and the uh
nineteen fifty swing dresses or the nineteen seventies dresses where
the detail was just so incredible, and I fell in
love with the detail. And I was like, this is
(38:22):
like if you watch that movie Lovecraft Country where it's
like a portal and they jump in and out of
the port I was like, oh my god, I just
jumped into the n I'm here and I and something happened,
you know. And I just happened to start dressing like that,
and then got involved in a community, a pin up
community where I could find these clothes overseas and like
(38:44):
London and Amsterdam and New Zealand and where it's very
popular over there for a lot of the girls to
steal dress like this. And that was it for me,
and I was stuck. I was like, this is it.
I want nothing else with my life. I'm stuck. So
the term bens and the cape CODs and the long
opera gloves, things that in that era, you know, from
(39:07):
the forties to even the sixties, people just dressed like
that every day. It wasn't like I didn't see any
of any pictures of my mother or in growing up
when my mother wore tennis shoes. Maybe when we went
to King's Dominion or amusement park or somewhere, or she
went walking with me. But you know things that we
(39:27):
wear every day now that are comments for us yoga
pants and that was for the gym. There was a
specific place for you to wear sweat clothes, you know,
And that was my So that's what I saw. And
I never even saw my mother until she started getting older,
you know, maybe five years before she passed wear pants.
So I went through my whole life sentence woman where
(39:49):
dressed it that just touched below to me, you know,
And but they were fitted dresses. They weren't like there
were the wiggle dresses. There were still sexy dress, you know,
And I fell in love with it. And it's been
what I've am just attracted to My soul is just
attracted to that energy. And when I see it, I'm like,
(40:11):
I gotta wear of this. I have to put this on,
even if I'm the only one walking around looking like
I'm in a costume. It's gorgeous. Like just having seen
your style and of course following you on Instagram and
like seeing all of these amazing styles and all this fashion.
(40:32):
I mean, it's just it's gorgeous time. And I think
that's really, you know, important to you know, and all
not all of my listeners are women, but I know
for a lot of us who are women, it's you know,
finding fashion can be this other place where you get
to find your voice and find you know who who
(40:53):
you are and how you want to express that you
know through your clothing. And yes, girl, you did that. Okay,
thank you. Last question I want to ask you is
when you need some joy, what are your favorite songs
to listen to right now? Oh? Michael wrote this song
called joy, Don't You Go? And it's like a John
(41:15):
and Style song, and heal be not even because he's
my husband. I tell you a story. When I first
met him, he had the CD called Shift and I
bought six c ds. It was like a Christian rock
kind of thing, and I bought six CDs and I
played that record to death, so people were stealing it
from me. I bought so many. They were like, we're
(41:35):
taking it because we're sick of parents. But he's my
favorite songwriter, you know, and I think it's because of
how far in he allowed himself to write. Um. So,
this is a song that song joy, don't you go
um anything by my Hood Jackson. When I want to
feel closer to the universe, when I want to feel,
(41:56):
you know, get my soul into that place. Um Uh.
There's a song called Oceans I can't remember. I think
it's a Hillsong song and it's one of my favorites
when I when I want to feel close to who
I am and what my purposes. I listened to that
song as well. You know, yeah, I love it, y'all.
(42:20):
Thank you to Tanya Trotter for coming on here, inspiring us,
telling us your story, Tanya, getting to hear some of
the music that you love, getting to hear how you
make the music that we love as well. Tanya, thank
you so much for joining me. I will definitely be
letting everyone know how they can follow. But you can
(42:41):
listen to Hearts Town. I'm gonna tell you that right now.
You can listen to Hearts Town. Wherever you listen to music,
go to there. Go to there and listen to it.
And I heard a rumor Heartstown be on Vinyl two
for the people that you know want to be involved
in that. It's a lot of things you can be doing,
but just go to there and listen to Heartstown. Tanya,
thank you so much, Thank you so much for having
(43:02):
me and just being the beautiful life that you are.
I love you to death and life. Thanks again to
Tanya Trotter from the War and Treaty and I'm not playing.
Y'all need to go and listen to that music. You
can check out their website, the War and Treaty dot com.
(43:22):
You can listen to their newest album, Hearts Town wherever
you like to stream your music. You can follow them
at the War and Treaty on Instagram, and you can
follow Tanya at she Underscore Loves Vintage on Instagram. And
of course, don't forget. You don't have to remember all
this in case you're driving or otherwise and disposed. All
(43:45):
of this information will be on the show notes at
Amina Brown dot com slash her with Amina, you can
find notes links to the different things that I talked
to guests about to make sure you check that out.
And I hope you're following me already, but if you're
not follow me at Amina b e E at Amina
be on Instagram, I would love to connect with you.
(44:08):
I would love to engage with you here. Your thoughts
about these episodes you can also find on my Instagram.
There are some different clips and questions they're following up
on some of the content we're talking about on the podcast,
so I'd love to engage with you there. This week's
Give Her a Crown is a shout out to Maraldi
(44:30):
and Naomi Hirabayashi, co founders and co CEO s of Shine,
an award winning self care app and community for people
with anxiety and depression. I used Shine myself, and let
me tell you to know that there is an app
like this with meditation and sleep stories and so much
more founded by two women of color and hearing the
(44:53):
voices of women of color as I meditate or take
some time to call my mind while using the app,
me the world. If you are looking for an app
that centers women of color and encourages self care. I
highly recommend the Shine app. Mara and Naomi thank you
for paving the way for women of color and startups
and for encouraging conversation around mental health and self care.
(45:17):
Mara and Naomi give them a crown. Her with Amina
Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Soul Graffiti Productions
as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in
(45:39):
partnership with I Heart Radio. Thanks for listening and don't
forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
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