The Staves
are three sisters known for their stunning harmonies and folk infused melodies.
Although relatively new on the music scene, they have toured with Willy Mason,
Joshua Radin and have just been announced as the US support for Bon Iver. To
find out about the disadvantages of working with your sisters and why pop music
is dead we spoke to oldest sister Emily Staveley-Taylor.
When did the three of
you start singing?
We got started just singing around the house, singing to
whatever mum and dad were listening to, which was a lot of Beatles, a lot of
Simon and Garfunkel, just loads of sixties pop and Motown. Our parents would
have parties and the guitars would come out and we would all have a sing song,
it was a sociable thing to do, just to sing together. We did a gig of covers
and just thought it was great, bit-by-bit we replaced the covers with songs we
had written ourselves. A couple of years ago we decided to really give it a go
and work hard on this.
Do you have a main
songwriter?
We all chip in, it’s a fairly collaborative process really.
It was strange when we started writing songs as I was at university at
Manchester and Millie and Jess were both still at school in Watford. I would
come home and either Jess or Millie had written something then we would kind of
arrange it for the three of us and in doing that the song would change anyway.
Then Jess went off to university and I moved back to Watford. It’s always been
quite disjointed, it’s only been in the last year or so that we have been
physically in the same place together to even get a feel of what our writing
process together really is. It’s always been really different, either we will
sit in a room and in 3 hours we will bash out a song completely together or it
will be almost entirely one persons work, which will be brought to the table
and given The Staves treatment.
What are the
advantages and disadvantages of being sisters?
I guess one of the main advantages is swapping clothes and
all that stuff. It’s just nice to spend time with people who know you inside
out, who you don’t have to explain anything to, you just look at them and they
know, you never really need to talk about it, what’s going on in your head or
what you think about a song. It makes things work quicker because you don’t
have to go into it. Also if you are really annoyed, which happens, you can tell
them pretty forcefully and know that it’s going to be alright, I wouldn’t talk
to my friends the way I speak to them. The disadvantages are that you fight,
you squabble all the time, over what music to listen to in the van or what
songs we should play, everything that kids squabble about.
