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Not too many people haven’t heard of the Roe Family Singers, well most of the people around these parts anyway. You can catch every Monday night at the 331 Club, in Minneapolis.

Their old-timey, foot stomping, folk music is sure to get a rise of most folks. They convey a good time because they are having a good time playing music. They are entertaining, and endearing all at the same time.

Kim and Quillan Roe started the band back in 2003, and have just recently released a new album of original and traditional tunes entitled Songs of the Mountains, Songs of the Plains.

Quillan Roe from the group was able to answer some questions about songwriting, their Kickstarter experience and what the future holds.

Rift: What is the songwriting process like, and when you bring in the guest musicians/and other members do you write their parts or do they come up with their own?

Q Roe: Songwriting is never the same twice. I wish that it was, that there was a formula I could rely on every time, but it happens differently every time.

Sometimes it starts with a melody line I get stuck in my head; sometimes it’s a chord progression on the guitar that suggests either an emotion to start working with or a melody line; sometimes it’s a lead line on the banjo that I build a song around.

Kim tends to begin with a story she wants to tell, and then she fleshes it out with a melody line and chord structure.

As I get older, the hardest part has become writing lyrics, figuring out what I want to say and how to say it. When I was in my Twenties it felt like ideas for songs were everywhere, just waiting to be plucked out of the ether and shaped into songs, like how Michelangelo supposedly said that when he looked at a block of marble he could see the sculpture trapped inside and he just had to free it.

Now songs take months to write, sometimes, literally, years. I let the process take as long as it needs to take, because I feel that’s the way I get the best results: if I let the process happen organically—if I get myself and my ego out of the way—the songs are stronger when I let myself be a conduit for the song itself.

Which means that now and then, I get lucky and an entire song will pop into my head at once, which is what happened with the song, “O Young Lovers,” on the new CD. I woke up at 3 in the morning, and the whole thing was just there, and I could feel that it was a good song and I needed to write it down before it disappeared.

Once a song is written, Kim, and I practice it at home to get our parts solidified. If the song is complicated (which, for us, means more than a typical 1-4-5 chord structure) we’ll vlog it and email it to the rest of the band with a chord sheet.

If it’s relatively simple, we spring it on them cold on a Monday night at the 331 Club. We’ve done that A LOT over the years, and it is a testament to the other musicians in this band that they can learn on the fly like that and make it sound like they’ve played it a bunch already.

If the song seems like a keeper, as in, the audience seems to like it, and the band seems to like it, we’ll keep playing it on Monday nights to get the structure solidified, but I don’t think that there are substantial “parts” for any given song until we record it in a studio. Then the parts become set, but the solos are still all improvised live, which I love.

Rift: You did a Kickstarter Campaign for this album, what were the most significant challenges with that and do you have any tips for others planning to do it?

Q Roe: Kickstarter is amazing. The idea that all of these people, some of whom you know, some whom you don’t, all contribute what they can, and that adds up to some large sum of money, is so cool.

That people want to contribute, that contributing feels like being a part of the process (because we contribute to as much as we can afford to, too), is awesome. I love it.

The process itself is pretty daunting for me because there are a lot of pieces to get in place to make it work right. Luckily KS walks you through the whole thing and, although it is a lot of prep work, it makes the process a lot smoother during the campaign, and on the backside when you’re doing fulfillment. So tip No. 1 is follow those recommendations.

Tip No. 2 is have a Kim Roe in your back pocket. Kim has been INCREDIBLE on this whole thing. She organized the heck out of every aspect of this project so that we were able to run a successful campaign and keep folks engaged while we were doing it. The fulfillment has been relatively smooth, with all of the reward tiers broken down into easy-to-understand spreadsheets. So when it comes time to physically stuff the envelopes it’s all charted out for us, and we just look at it and say, “Ole Olson” gets a CD, a t-shirt, a tote bag, and a magnet,” and then we stuff those in an envelope and check Ole off the list.

Tip No. 3 is that you can only bring about ten packages at a time to the post office. We got SUPER lucky the first day we mailed stuff out: we brought 79 packages to be mailed, and they mailed them for us. It took over an hour, and while the teller was helping us, her boss came and told us that the teller was being REALLY kind to us and could have told us to come back with only ten at a time, because that’s their official limit. We’ve been using three different post offices in our neck of the woods, mailing packages ten at a time, for about a week now!

Rift: You have generated a pretty good following all the way from Kirkwood Hollow to Minneapolis and other areas in the state. You also have had some success touring. Is the plan to become a “National Act.”

Q Roe: Absolutely. We’ve been making our living solely from music for about seven years now, which blows me away when I think about it, and we love it and are tremendously thankful for it.

I hope that working with Pinecastle Records helps us to grow on a National scale. We’d love to play at the big festivals and shows, like Blue Ox here in the Midwest, and Merlefest out East, and Winfield in KS; Red Rocks, Mountain Stage, Big Top Chautauqua, Live from Here, would be cool; and, of course, the Grand Ol’ Opry. I don’t know if any of that is possible, but I have to believe it gets closer-to-possible when you’re working with a label and are considered National.

Which isn’t to say we want to play less here, we love Minnesota. Minneapolis is home. This is our community, and community is very important to us. And the music community here, specifically, is incredible, with so much talent and so much support from local radio and press, too.

Rift: Your new album is out, and the gigs are set up. What does the next year look like for The Roe Family Singers?

Q Roe: Playing as many shows as we can, as far afield as we can. We’ve been going to Folk Alliance International and the International Bluegrass Music Association’s conferences for the last few years, and we’ll keep doing those, to help let more folks know about us.

We’d also really like to find a booking agent and a manager. I’ve been booking and managing my bands for a couple of decades now, and Kim’s been doing it for about four years, too, and I feel like we’re at the far edge of what we know how to do. I imagine that a manager and an agent can help us get to the next step and help us grow into that National Act we were talking about.

Rift: If you had a piece of advice for anyone about anything what would it be?

Q Roe: Being a working musician is the hardest job I’ve ever had. Even when we were playing a full-time schedule and still had day jobs (read: steady income and health insurance) and I THOUGHT I knew what this lifestyle was about, I was totally wrong. And, at that point, I’d been in the business for 20 years already.

So the advice is this: prepare yourself as much as you can before you throw yourself into this lifestyle; save money; be frugal; plan out your tour routes carefully; work hard, really, really, really hard; be a good person, because everyone knows everyone in this business, across genres and across the country; stay true to who YOU are as an artist and a person; don’t sell out; remember that you have the best job in the world, playing music and making people feel good, so be thankful for that, never take it for granted, and work hard.

Roe Family Singers Website