We've got these two friends, let's call 'em Aaron and Bryan, who've got an excellent selection of little brown jugs on a high shelf in their kitchen. And every time we go over to their house we end up not-so-carefully selecting a little brown jug and having more to drink out of it than we'd planned. The next morning we curse them under our whiskey breaths. Well, these two friends went down to New Orleans a couple years ago and saw the Preservation Hall Jazz Band play this son

This year has been our best one yet and the worst year ever. The year is almost over and we've got one more song to do for Double Americana before we say to 2017, "good riddance, we'll miss you all the same." We're not going to take much time here to reminisce and look back on all the ups and downs except to say, we've come a long way since we got our camper stuck in the mud and started this long tour of a year. We've learned a lot, especially about mud season. Today we clean

Scott's Dad has this joke. It goes like this; "I'm not afraid of heights, but I am afraid of widths." It's an easy joke. Not very funny. Solid C material straight out of the joke book every father is handed when their first child is born. But every time he hears that someone is afraid of heights, he can't help it. He repeats the joke. It's tradition. It's kind of like how every December, Mallory starts singing "Silver Bells" in the smoothest, crooning, baritone since Bing C

It's the middle of December and the days are short and cold even in California. Every night we've heard the gentle whirring of a giant fan in the orange grove behind Scott's parents' house, a sign that the temperature has dropped low enough that the air needs to be kept moving so that the oranges don't freeze. There are Christmas lights on houses and obligatory Christmas concerts, poinsettias and seasonal cookies. This is the time of year when you miss someone; the time of ye

It's been a crazy couple weeks here in the land of The R&T. Between releasing a music video for Tiny Moses, playing shows in Reedley, Santa Margarita, and Paso Robles (thanks to everyone who came out and supported us!), completing our Kickstarter (WE MADE IT THANKS TO YOU!), readying press releases, submitting our music to distributors, and drinking a lot of Turkish Coffee, we've been the proverbial chicken minus a head. And it wasn't just a crazy week for us. It was a crazy

Well, we're in the thick of it here, folks. And if you're not looking for the perfect Christmas present for your Double Americana obsessed friend, then you're probably looking for coffee. Luckily for you, we've got both. For today's Rumbly Tummy, we decided to walk you through how to make Turkish Coffee. Last Christmas, Mallory got Scott this ibrik and set of 3 espresso cups, the perfect size to spring on curious relatives during your holiday celebration. The first time we ha

"Tiny Moses" is the single off our new record, We Made Ourselves a Home When We Didn't Know and we dropped it into the Earth's river of ears yesterday-- that's to say, the Internet. And to accompany it, on the coldest day of February this year, we gathered our most fool hardy friends (or, at least the most able to sustain freezing temperatures for extended periods of time) and asked them to volunteer the skill sets and talents they've honed. And, weirdly enough, they said y

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up under some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly feeling of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way y

Today on Double Americana we're covering a sea shanty called, "Pay Me My Money Down." You see, we started a Kickstarter Campaign, (have we told you about this yet?) and were looking for folk songs dealing with money, and wouldn't you know it, there aren't all that many traditional folk tunes that deal with raising capital via crowdsourcing in order to independently release music to a techno-savvy audience who is increasingly indifferent to new folk music, and so we settled on

Happy Kickstarter Day! Listen, we aren't experts on anything. Just ask us. But since we were so close to our southern friends' border, and really wanted an alliteration for Kickstarter, we decided to pick up some foods we have generally only found local to the Southwest. Which is how we ended up here, informing you on how to cook cactus when we are doing it for the first time. But it worked out for us, and we hope it fills your belly as you click the "donate" button on ou

"I thought when it said 'launch' that it meant-- 'hit this button and it'll take a little while for us to approve it and then we will send you another button to hit in order to actually launch it!'" said Mallory. Whoops. Well, just like Mallory's tendency to accidentally drop a mallet or a violin bow on her glockenspiel between songs, sounding a resonant but often out of tune note during another of Scott's boring segues, we have accidentally launched our Kickstarter campaign

We're in Moab, UT at a semi-upscale Vietnamese inspired restaurant called 98 Center (yelp it, it's awesome.) Dim lights, delicious drink menu, and lots of vegetarian/gluten free options. We came here the night before as well, because when you live in a camper and boondock on a regular basis, you need electricity to power your devices, and we needed to get a little work done. And so, we ordered some dinner and drinks (vegan bahn mi sandwiches and some truly inspired bahn mi na

It's Monday morning and we are parked in the Wall Drug parking lot, just outside the Badlands in South Dakota. The dogs and I just howled like coyotes in our excitement of the cold weather and the celebration of the end of another long weekend of fun, but tiring, shows. Scott is doing an inventory of our refrigerator, pulling the nearly too-far-gone tomatoes and the wilting cabbage out, "The radish green and radishes on the bottom right should probably go," I say. "Ooooh,"

This week on Double Americana, we’re taking a pass at "Buffalo Gals," which you probably know from school or from “It’s A Wonderful Life.” In Scott’s case, it was decidedly not school and definitely “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which he watched over and over again when he was 7, home sick with the chicken pox. It took him years to appreciate the movie and not to itch whenever he heard the song. Mallory thinks she learned the song from a cartoon frog who is always a little bit dru

It's September 6th, which means we're getting to that lovely and awkward time of year where the leaves are starting to fall from the trees but only after a good rainstorm, the nights are getting cold but not cold enough that you can keep the comforter on all night, and when your flannel shirt sits like a hitchhiker in your passenger seat. This is the time of year when you still want iced coffee but you've begun kicking yourself every time you don't order the pumpkin spice lat

“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing son

We are sitting in a hotel room-- pretty much the fanciest hotel we get all year-- in Wichita. This is our third year playing at the city's beautiful botanical gardens. And every year since our first one, we've been trying to convince our pal from Nashville to meet us here to see it all-- the gardens, the hotel, how kind everyone is, and Joe. Joe is the bartender at the event. Our first year, he asked us our drink, we asked for Jack Daniels on rocks, and then we spent the

We were all crying and gulping down our Watermelon Mint Sloshes as fast as we could. When we caught our breath, we kept taking more bites. It hurt so good. Ryan had a couple of requests, and jalapeno poppers weren't one of them. Ryan doesn't even really like spicy food. But with pepper season in full swing at the local farmers market, we had those little jalapenos wedged everywhere from behind the mustard to between ciders, and they were falling out each time we opened ou

For as popular as this song is, we are a little surprised that we hadn't heard it in all our lives! This, friends, is why we need friends. This week on Double Americana, we are joined by our pals, Brian and Sheralyn Barnes, who live in a cool apartment in St. Paul and give us keys to said apartment to shower while we park in their street for a couple weeks. And when we asked them what song they would like to do with us, "Bury Me Beneath the Willow" was their reply. From Al

We got a little carried away. What with all this Wednesdays at noon livecast Double Americana nonsense, and all this Rumbly Tummy food blog every first Wednesday silliness. We forgot, with all these self imposed deadlines and goals and new projects and release dates and what's nexts, to stop, look around, see where we are, and say "Hello." Hello! We are in the middle of it all. A little past the middle of the year, sitting in the middle of Wisconsin in the middle of the co