My wife Denise and I run this little Internet radio station called The Other Side. We’ve been married, and have worked together out of our home, for almost 32 years. Our slogan? “There are no visible bruises.”
Lots of husband/wife teams work in music, too. Tanya Blount and Michael Trotter Jr. are wife and husband and call themselves The War and Treaty. Their slogan? “Just two lovebirds singing without reverb.”
Both artists have interesting, and pretty divergent, backgrounds. Blount got her entertainment start in 1993 opposite Lauryn Hill as “Tanya” in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. She sang a song with Hill in the film. She debuted a solo album in 1994. Although she did some work on another potential solo release, it wouldn’t come to pass. But, she was featured in the title song for another film, Panther, in 1995. She was nominated for a Soul Train award that year, too.
Michael Trotter Jr. joined the army at 19. In 2003, he was deployed to Iraq where he taught himself to play a piano that had been previously owned by… Saddam Hussein. About two years later, he returned home and met Tanya at a music festival. They married and had a child.
It wasn’t until 2016 that Trotter and Blount (as they were initially known) released Love Affair as a digital download. Healing Tide followed in 2018, as the first release from The War and Treaty (any guess which spouse is “War” and which is “Treaty?”). Are You Ready to Love Me was the single from that album that I played on an FM station I volunteered for at the time. I considered the song “interesting,” but not something that I would necessarily write home to Mother about. The song ended up as a “stiff” (the not-particularly-pleasant radio term for a song that starts out as a hit, but dies before being put in the gold category).
This month brings release of Hearts Town, featuring the likes of Jason Isbell, Jerry Douglas, and Chris Eldridge. This is different. It’s deeper. It’s more meaningful. You’ll be hearing several tracks on The Other Side. And, I’m figuring you’ll enjoy them as much as I do.