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Call Me Spinster is one part kaleidoscopic indie rock, one part porchy holler pop — and every bit a family operation. The brainchild of three sisters in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Call Me Spinster skims nostalgia from psychedelic folk to ‘90s synth-pop, weaving frank vocals with ethereal harmonies to make sense of their constantly growing world.
Band practice for Call Me Spinster is not your typical beer-fueled midnight garage rock. It starts at 10 a.m. A 7-month-old chews an XLR cord in the corner. A toddler naps in the next room over the screech of bass amps and keyboards. The sisters pause constantly to breastfeed, change a diaper, or lull a cranky child back to sleep. By 1 p.m., they’ve taken their third caffeine break, booked a gig, and read “The Hug Machine” for what feels like a dozen times. This is the working rhythm of three co-parenting sisters who are getting ready to release Potholes, a timeless, genre-bending freshman album.
The chaos of motherhood would cause most bands to stall, but Call Me Spinster has always rocked with children in the background. When Amelia, the eldest sister, became pregnant with her first child in 2017, she took maternity leave from her teaching job. The same month Amelia’s son was born, her sisters Rachel and Rosie quit their respective teaching jobs in Costa Rica and Portland, Oregon and joined Amelia in Chattanooga.
No one’s really sure if it was the allure of starting an all-sister band or the call to aunthood that convinced Rosie and Rachel to give up everything (including Rachel’s Honda 250 and Rosie’s burgeoning handball career) and join Amelia in Tennessee. But Call Me Spinster arrived with the family’s next generation.
The sisters began by tackling Prince and Drake covers on a hodgepodge of acquired instruments — including their Amish grandfather’s old accordion, an upright bass, glockenspiel, and even the occasional pie pan. They busked, played brunch gigs and local festivals, then eventually opened for bigger touring acts across the Southeast. When they started applying their unorthodox arrangements to their own songs, they quickly attracted New West/Strolling Bones label head George Fontaine Sr., who connected them with producer Drew Vandenberg (of Montreal, Faye Webster, Toro y Moi) to create their first EP in 2020.
“The result is a set of songs that they can certainly be proud of, a series of soft, shimmering melodies that convey both youthful enthusiasm and elegiac indulgence,” wrote American Songwriter. It was a solid start; a bit of press and a musical object to place amidst the unusual array of trinkets and local folk art on their merch table.
The music world began to open up again and Call Me Spinster hopped back into the studio and continued writing, some apart, some together, some in tandem with Amelia’s husband, DH Jacobs, who also collaborates on many of the band’s unique visuals. They expanded the band, adding Rachel’s partner, Luis Alfredo Fortin, on guitar and, later, John Hooker on drums.
During the writing of Potholes, Call Me Spinster was a lifeline to the world outside, and a mirror of the lives inside — which expanded with two more babies. Throughout the album, the sisters reckon with past relationships, the very early phases of marriage and motherhood. According to Amelia, a major theme throughout “is stumbling into the new, all-consuming identity of a domestic person. So much tiredness, so many endless piles of mundane tasks and minutiae. Time will stand still, then, suddenly, erupt into technicolored joy.”
While the inspirations are raw, there is no shortage of technicolored joy on this album. Call Me Spinster underscores emotional depth with bouncy electropop that makes you want to dance in public. Letting the truth about domestic life spill out in dreamy melodies, intricate harmonies, and deeply personal lyrics that speak to anyone who’s ever felt simultaneously stuck and love-struck.
Potholes was recorded in the vaunted studios of Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia where Call Me Spinster teamed again with Drew Vandenberg to co-produce and engineer the record. Base tracks were recorded live as much as possible, pulling in JoJo Glidewell (of Montreal, Modern Skirts) on keyboards and piano. Countless harmonies and overdubs were recorded in Rachel’s Chattanooga bedroom, synth or solo ideas passed back and forth between band members, Glidewell, Vandenberg, and pedal steelist Matt ‘Pistol’ Stoessel.
The result is a truly unusual concoction, swirling around familiar sounds but always landing slightly askew of expected territory. The first track “Feet Are Dirty” nods to Robyn and ‘90s synth pop but with a post-punk plainness that is both wistful and honest and entirely its own brand. The second track, “Married,” trades in Rosie on lead vocals in a dreamy, almost psychedelic offering, with moments of Minnie Riperton-era Rotary Connection and Air. Other songs like “White Lines” dip into the realm of country - folk, but in an unusually understated, anti-Nashville style, pedal steel or accordion pinging nostalgia but staying out of the way. “Born in a Ditch” is a doo-op era banger, but like their effervescent first single, “Here You Are,” moves outside the trope with an unexpected twang and in this case, trumpet by Wave Magnetik.
Like The Louvin Brothers and The Roches before them, the sisters harness the gift of blood harmony — a rare phenomenon available only to siblings who have grown up singing together. It shows in the uncanny way their voices blend, but also in the way their songs meld, locking disparate influences and writers into something coherent and powerful.
“Part of me wishes we’d started this project two decades ago,” says Amelia. “The learning curve seems nearly impossible sometimes - we’re running on fumes, always doing things partway. But I keep reminding myself - if we can learn to write songs, play some instruments, sing in front of people, the basics of sound engineering, all while birthing and raising young kids - I get really excited for what’s on the horizon. It feels like we’re just getting started.”