Like many of the songs on First Aid Kit’s second album, The Lion’s Roar, current single “Emmylou” rings with a bittersweet tune, carried by pedal steel and acoustic guitar. The closely blended voices of sisters Klara and Johanna Soderberg are one key reason why the piece stands above so much modern folk-pop. The song’s sweet and simple chorus is another -- a dual tribute to the joy of making music with a partner, and the artists who’ve inspired them to do so: “I’ll be your Emmylou and I’ll be your June, if you’ll be my Gram and my Johnny, too,” the sisters sing of classic C&W duet duos Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, June Carter and Johnny Cash. “Just sing, little darling, sing with me.”
“I think only last week both Polly Parsons and Roseanne Cash wrote to us saying they love the song,” says Klara Soderberg, explaining how Gram and Johnny’s daughters contacted them via Twitter. “It’s just really -- really sort of mind-blowing.”
To Soderberg, getting approval from Gram and Johnny's daughters is the most surprising bit of adulation she’s ever received. She quietly gasps a little, over the line from her home in Stockholm, before relating the story. That said, it’s not the first time she’s been praised by her idols.
First Aid Kit made such an impression on Jack White, they all spent a day in October 2010 making a record in his Nashville studio. Late last year, at a tribute to Patti Smith, their harmonizing on “Dancing Barefoot” brought the Godmother of Punk to tears.
For the rest of us, the sounds of the folk-pop duo are maybe more quietly appreciated -- though at least First Aid Kit’s non-famous fanbase is contributing to some promising record sales. (The Lion’s Roar debuted at No. 1 in their native Sweden last week. It’s currently No. 4 on the Billboard folk chart.)
And Soderberg says she’s been touched by the response to her music, no matter the source. “It’s always amazing when someone likes your music or comes up to you at a show and just tells you how much music has meant to you,” she says. “That always, to me, it really gives me a lot of inspiration and gives me a lot of power.”
Reaching out to the artists we admire isn’t always easy, though -- never mind the odds of meeting your idol, or just finding a pop star who responds on Twitter. Soderberg knows it. She’s a Bright Eyes fan -- though that’s something of an understatement. “They were really the starting point for First Aid Kit, in a lot of ways,” she says of the earnest, Omaha folk-rock band.
Soderberg is 18. At age 12, like many 12-year-olds, she “was listening to a lot of Green Day,” whatever was on the radio, and the contents of her parents’ record collection (plenty of Patti Smith, Television and Velvet Underground, apparently). Then a friend told her to check out Bright Eyes’ “The First Day of My Life.” What happened next is all in its title.
“I just heard that song and it was so raw and honest, just guitar and vocals, but it said so much by doing so little,” she remembers. “It was pretty much at that moment I just knew this is what I have to do. I have to get a guitar, I have to start writing songs. …That’s why we started writing songs.”
She began exploring the band’s influences -- “I found Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons and so really, through Bright Eyes, I found all this music that’s now so important to us.”
Skip ahead a few years, and Soderberg and her sister had formed a band, recorded with the help of their father (Benkt Soderberg, who plays bass on The Lion’s Roar), gained notoriety for a beautiful 2008 YouTube cover of Fleet Foxes’ “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song,” and released an EP (2008’s Drunken Trees). By 2009, that disc, out on Wichita -- the same label to release many of Bright Eyes’ recordings -- would be her ticket to meeting her idol, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. Because of their shared label, the sisters scored backstage access to one of his shows in Stockholm. “I had thought about it for a long time. If I met Conor Oberst, I had to tell him how much his music has meant to us,” says Soderberg. Instead: “I just went completely quiet.”
Still, they passed him a CD, and, says Soderberg, “we pretty much thought we were screwed and that they’d never listen to our record.”
It took a year -- and a concert date in Austin, Texas -- to discover they were wrong. Oberst was in the city at the same time as the girls. They met up again -- apparently their first impression wasn’t as “awkward” as Soderberg remembered -- but this time, he introduced them to Bright Eyes’ producer/multi-instrumentalist, Mike Mogis.
By this time, First Aid Kit had an album behind them, 2010’s The Big Black and the Blue, and were making plans for its follow-up. “We met him the night before our show…and we just said, ‘You’re our dream producer, basically,’” Soderberg recalls. Mogis, she says, was a little incredulous -- and after watching their concert the following day, “he pretty much just sent us an e-mail right after the show” accepting the offer. “We were very happy,” she says with some adorkable satisfaction.
In May 2011, the sisters spent a month recording in Omaha, Nebraska with Mogis. (Oberst sang and wrote a verse on the rollicking album closer, “The King of the World” -- the song on the disc which sounds most like a Bright Eyes track, his participation not withstanding.) “We’ve loved so many bands from Omaha for a long time, so for us it was this Mecca where all this music we love came from,” she says, rattling off names including Cursive, Rilo Kiley, The Good Life -- just about anything on Mogis and Oberst’s indie label, Saddle Creek. And during her month working in the city, many of those idolized musicians became part of her circle, regularly hanging out at barbecues in Mogis’ backyard. “It was sort of weird to get to know these people,” she says, “and trying to act like it wasn’t this big deal for me.”
That said, she had thankfully outgrown being starstruck by then. “It’s not like ‘omigod, I can’t breathe,” says Soderberg. “It’s more like ‘this is really awesome -- and they have no idea.’”
The Lion’s Roar, by First Aid Kit, is available now. First Aid Kit’s Canadian Tour Dates include:
April 3, Montreal
April 4, Toronto
April 10, Vancouver
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