The Rosebuds
By Michelle Gilzenrat
Photo by Tim Lytvinenko

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes...
a record deal with Merge Records?

The Rosebuds’ story does not have your typical fairytale ending, and it’s certainly not your typical band beginning, either. Yet the duo’s serendipitous beginnings and rapid success will likely inspire countless other couples to look inward and say, “Hey, we could do that!”

Frankly, however, they probably couldn’t. It’s just that Kelly Crisp and husband Ivan Howard make it look easy because they are both exceptionally talented and extraordinarily lucky. They found each other as friends, bonded eventually in marriage, and when the opportunity came to play music together, somehow they proved to be a perfect match there, too.

“In a lot of ways, most of what happens to us is just magic,” Crisp reflects, her smile audible over the phone line.

The possibility of supernatural influences doesn’t seem like such a stretch. After all, how many bands can say they were conceived, rehearsed and booked within a span of 24 hours?

But that’s how it all started for The Rosebuds. The newlyweds were lounging at home having taken a week off work after their big day. Too poor to honeymoon, they had just begun to grow restless with boredom when opportunity called.

“There was an opening at a local club, “ Crisp recounts. “They needed somebody to fill in for a band that cancelled that night and [Howard] signed us up to do it.”
Hanging up the phone, Howard made the announcement to his wife of two days: “So, we’re in a band and our first show is tonight. Let’s write some songs.”

Maybe a last minute gig isn’t a big deal for a group of seasoned musicians, but Crisp had never written a song before, nor been in a band, and Howard was a self-taught guitarist with just about two years of experience. Nonetheless, Howard jumped at the chance to perform without hesitation.

“We just decided, like, ‘Who cares?’ We’re newlyweds. We can do anything we want so let’s start a band!”

And with that, they pulled off their first show and pulled it off well. With Howard on guitar and vocals, Crisp on keys, and a Sears drum machine providing the beats, The Rosebuds made their impromptu debut.

The Rosebuds particularly impressed the other local musicians in attendance, who approached them afterwards to arrange future shows. By the third gig, The Rosebuds had enthusiastic fans bringing them homemade merchandise to sell.

Crisp believes that their early appeal was due in part to their unique stage show, which integrated the music with Crisp’s previous experience in a performance art group. When Howard suggested the band, Crisp agreed under certain stipulations.

“I told him, yeah, I’ll do it, but it can’t be anything like a band,” she says. “It has to be a lot of fun, and also, when we play we’ll set up the stage like a living room.” Audiences loved their novel approach. “We would set up a TV on stage, and we’d have a guy sitting in a chair on stage in front of us, like, eating nachos and watching NASCAR.”

Gradually, however, the focus moved more and more toward the music, for both the audience and the band.

“We were the anti-band, experiment art project that everybody thought was so funny, but I think the main thing that they liked were the songs,” says Crisp.
“Eventually we started to think, ‘This is a lot of trouble, bringing all this furniture down here.’ We just got lazy and started being a normal band!”

Laziness has never paid off so well. A few months after relocating to Raleigh from Wilmington, The Rosebuds sent a demo off to their dream label, Merge Records. After waiting a few months with no reply, Crisp had another idea. Merge founder McCaughan had a band called Portastatic — maybe they could get his attention by booking a show with them. The idea came up in passing as the couple drove home from the grocery store. They arrived to find quite a surprise on their answering machine.

“I still have the tape!” laughs Crisp. “It’s Mac from Merge saying, “I got you guys’ demo here and I really like it. I was wondering if you’d like to play a show with Portastatic?’ And we both were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ We had just talked about this in the car, and we get home and here’s a message saying exactly what we just said.”

Not long after they had their record deal and their debut, Make Out, which was released in 2003. The Rosebuds enjoyed critical acclaim for the album, which was full of catchy hooks, subtle irony, and infectious energy. It was an exuberant record, and one that the press incessantly compared to the enthusiasm of new love.

That parallel continues to be drawn by the media to this day with every successive Rosebuds release. While Crisp says she doesn’t necessarily mind the speculation, she completely dismisses the notion that her personal relationship with Howard is reflected in their music.

“If you were a vegetarian people wouldn’t say, ‘So that’s your lifestyle, so you probably write a lot of songs about vegetarianism.’ We don’t make a conscious effort to draw a parallel at all.” One publication went as far as to write off The Rosebuds as “couplecore,” as if being married was a new genre of music.
This shortsightedness has been especially frustrating for the band with their ambitious new record, Night of the Furies. They have made a departure from their early pop sound in favor of seductive new wave influences and electronic landscapes.

“I’ve read some reviews of our record, and they just totally get it wrong sometimes,” says Crisp. “I think they get hung up on the couple thing. They think, ‘Oh this is dark territory there must be wrong with them.’ We are a little bit smarter than that, it’s just that no one gives us credit for it yet!”

The self-produced record features beautifully crafted vignettes that reference, both literally and metaphorically, the Furies, the vengeful legends of Greek mythology.
“It became easy for us to use the Furies as a blanket metaphor to talk about politics and culture and anything we wanted to talk about,” says Crisp. “We just used the Furies as a vehicle for that.”

As for as production, Howard provides some insight as to why they decided to go it alone.

“We just wanted time to get all of the sounds we heard in our heads into the songs and see if they would work out, “ he says. “In traditional studios the clock is always running, and we really needed the time to experiment and try anything we could think of for the songs.”

That sense of experimentation is clearly evident in The Rosebuds’ increasingly mature sound. For a band that formed from an impulsive, spur of the moment decision they have evolved into an international success, with tours across Europe and a record deal in Japan. With the enthusiastic support of Merge and their fans, The Rosebuds are finally at the point where they can afford to do music full time. Maybe now would be a good time to take that honeymoon?

www.therosebuds.com