Tag: Michael Trotter Jr.

Inspired by Gospel, The War and Treaty Make Their Move on ‘Lover’s Game’

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The War and Treaty’s new album, Lover’s Game, is a fitting tribute to the force that brought Michael and Tanya Trotter together. The Iraqi war veteran and the former singing prodigy who signed her first record deal at 16 have been capturing hearts with their riotously soulful sound since they began performing together in 2014. At home in Nashville, mid-tour, they discuss with BGS how their partnership has shaped their songwriting.

You’ve been together 13 years and your latest songs suggest you’re as fiercely in love as ever. What’s the secret?

Michael: This is what Lover’s Game is all about… it’s us realizing that there’s more to relationships, there’s many different kinds of love. And when you’ve found something serious, hold on to it.

You’ve admitted to being inseparable since you met at a festival and there’s a nod to it in the track “Blank Page” – “When I first saw you, I said to myself that’s a good look…” What was it you saw in each other that day? 

Michael: I saw honesty. A lot of love in Tanya’s eyes. A desperate kind of hope: “Somebody in this world has to make me an honest woman when I say love is still here.” And I wanted to protect that. And hold her. Aside from the fact I saw her walk away one day and the bounce of her backside really encouraged me…

Tanya: [laughing] He took what I was going to say. When I first saw him I literally saw love in his eyes. And he talked so vulnerably – you don’t meet people who say right away “I have nothing.” Most people want to put on a front. And I had a son, and when I saw him with his – now our – daughter, it made me want to be a better mother.

As a married couple who tour you’re together all the time. And your performances are famously emotional affairs. Do you have to take time apart from each other?

Michael: [nodding vigorously] I’m learning that Tanya needs that a lot. She’s created a space in our house called The Pink Room where she goes alone to recharge. She says I’m tired, get out of here, go away man! I am completely different. I need to be stimulated till I pass out. It’s irritating!

Tanya: It’s not irritating, he just needs to watch a movie. He’ll put his bags down, sit in his recliner and the TV is on for three or four hours, that’s his way of coming down.

Michael: She’s being kind. Let me tell you how bad it is. Today, she wanted to get her nails done, but I didn’t want to be apart. So I just made some shit up: “I have some places to go…”

Tanya: [surprised] Oh, you didn’t have anywhere to go?

Michael: I went to goddamn Wendy’s.

Tanya: [laughing] Oh my God! He said he had this big plan…

Michael: I was going to tell you eventually, this is embarrassing. I circled the parking lot, went to Wendys, had a little food, went back to the car and watched movies.

It’s like your song “That’s How Love Is Made” says… “Can’t hate all your wrongs and only want all your rights…”

Michael: “Can’t say I’m tired when I don’t ask for help…” In my moments of neediness I will say I actually need you to touch me today. Hold my hand, rub my hair, put water on my head, because I can’t stop these thoughts racing. That’s post-traumatic stress disorder I have from the war. And she knows immediately how to get in gear. That is our balance, accepting each other’s…

Tanya: …quirks.

Do you think that’s part of your bond, that ability to understand what he’s going through? In your song “Five More Minutes” the pair of you wrote about the moment that Michael’s PTSD overwhelmed him to the point where he was ready to take his life. But Tanya you had your own experience of depression before you met him…

Tanya: Yes, when I was living in Dallas in my mid-20s, I took pills and ended up on 72-hour suicide watch. When I came out of hospital, I stayed with my mum for a year, and no discredit to my family but when you’re going through a dark time most people don’t know what to do. They’re clueless, even the ones who love you with everything in their heart. When I learned what Michael was going through I thought “What would I have wanted someone to do for me?” I would have wanted someone to literally stop everything they were doing and just help me get back to me. “You be better” doesn’t fix a person who is on the brink of giving up. You’ve got to spend time to get them off the ledge. Michael’s scars were invisible to the average person who doesn’t know the signs. He was giving love to everybody and no one was pouring it back into him.

And it was your experiences of war, Michael, that first led you to songwriting, paying tribute to the comrades you lost in Iraq. Is it hard to revisit what you went through then, having to go into detail for the sake of the writers working on the movie?

Michael: I can talk about it now – I can’t shut up about it. I understand the responsibility to tell how you made it out. Unlike some of my friends, I got home.

It feels like things have really taken off for the band this past year – you won the Americana Music Association’s award for duo/group of the year last September, and your set at the CMA Awards was the most talked about performance of the night. But back in 2020, when you played at the Grammys you must have thought that the breakthrough was coming a lot sooner…

Michael: Yes, from 2018 The War and Treaty had a real trajectory, and our management was saying 2020 was going to be our year. We were getting different invitations to perform, we were getting calls from John Legend saying “Let’s go on on tour…” and then COVID happened. It was a very emotional time, because Tanya was part of the first wave that caught COVID and I thought she was going to die. It was pretty bad. She would cough and it sounded like 10 lawnmowers being started up. So this moment now, we’ll never ever take it for granted, every day is by grace.

Did that experience change your approach to music?

Tanya: Yes – it taught me you’re always learning. I started taking vocal classes. I found a personal trainer online. I was more open to writing with other people.

Michael: The subjects we wrote about broadened, we realized it’s not just about what we’re going through. And our writing deepened because we lost people – we lost John Prine, we lost my aunts and my uncles, so many people where it crippled you for a minute. You’d go to write and all you’d get is tears. And it wasn’t just the pandemic, it was what happened after the George Floyd killings too. You have to respond to that. The problem is in how we see ourselves, we don’t see ourselves as one, we see ourselves as opposites. But we’re one race, we’re the human race.

Is songwriting therapeutic for you?

Michael: Always. I have to write because I don’t always get a chance to verbalize properly what I’m feeling.

You used to say you wrote 10 songs a day and most of them ended up in the trash can.

Michael: I’ve been chastised about the trash can. One man’s trash is another man’s potpourri. I keep everything now.

Tanya, you’ve been in the business three decades now – what have been the most valuable lessons?

Tanya: There’s a thin line between your creativity and the business. You have to separate the two. When we started we tried to do everything ourselves but approaching music from a business standpoint takes the specialness away from what you do when you get on stage. Let the manager do that kind of thinking, let them do what they’re paid to do. Although you still have to know what’s happening – learn to read a contract.

Your mother was a professional opera and Broadway singer…

Tanya: And my brother’s a gospel singer. My dad can’t sing but he still tells everyone we got it from him!

Did your mum teach you and your brother to sing?

Tanya: No but she exposed us to different styles. She put us in ballet and tap classes, too.

Michael, was your family into music?

Michael: I came from a weird, split home – my mother only listened to contemporary Christian music, she didn’t want to hear secular music. Dad was a rebel, he was listening to death metal! And when he was driving he would only listen to classical – Mozart, Paganini… Then my grandmother, she was from the country, so Granny’s favourite artists were Willie Nelson and The Outlaws and Loretta Lynn.

What were you drawn to?

Michael: Much like Tanya I was in love with Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, and gospel, everything from Thomas Whitfield and James Cleveland to Shirley Caesar and Sam Cooke. When I joined the military, Johnny Cash guided me, and kept me in some tough times when I needed to be kept. I grew up listening to music, period. I didn’t know the difference between genres.

You’re a keen appreciator of bluegrass, too – Jerry Douglas and Chris Eldridge both played on your last album, Hearts Town, you sat in with Billy Strings at WinterWonderGrass…

Michael: I grew up on The Gaithers and Ralph Stanley, so it’s great seeing bluegrass get this pump of life with Billy Strings, he’s pretty fearless right now. I don’t think people really truly understand what a true genius Chris Eldridge is as well.

The atmosphere at your gigs is often described as being like a “revival meeting” – how much does the background of your church tradition influence your sound?

Tanya: It’s intentional.

Michael: Yeah, we used to run from this question. Because the answer can be crippling when the religious experience for African Americans is dictated by pain. But that grit, that power, that resilience that is in Aretha Franklin’s version of “Amazing Grace,” the reverence that is in Mahelia Jackson’s “How I Got Over” – now I know, no matter the history, gospel singers were placed in our world to be the uplifters, to give hope. And for Tanya and I that’s in our blood. So to be able to put that same vigour, that urgency to a love song, to say I mean what I say – “I wholeheartedly believe that when I say I love you no one else can say it the same way” – that’s the gospel. Love.

Tanya: Every December we go over to Switzerland and perform at a gospel celebration. And those songs – “O Happy Day,” “Eye of the Sparrow” – pack out the place. Gospel means something different in Japan or Europe and that helped us open up our eyes. People would show up to our shows with a fire, wherever they go they expect you to bring hope. We want to keep that feeling and bring it back to the US.

These have certainly been times that people in the US and in the world in general need hope. 

Tanya: Michael said to me this morning that the world is suffocating. We may not have been wearing masks for a while but people still feel like they’re drowning. They want to breathe again.

Michael: Well come on to our show, ’cos we’re going to breathe together.

Photo Credit: Austin Hargrave

WATCH: The War and Treaty, “Ain’t No Harmin’ Me” (Live at the Opry)

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Artist: The War and Treaty
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Ain’t No Harmin’ Me”
Album: Lover’s Game
Release Date: March 10, 2023
Label: Mercury Nashville

In Their Words: “Love is the foundation of our new record and ‘Ain’t No Harmin’ Me’ reminds us that no matter what troubles are waiting around the corner…the power of love will pull us through. We wrote this together as a personal testament to ourselves…we aren’t afraid to face the hard times knowing we have the other by our side. It felt like an awakening for us, and I hope fans can feel that same energy when they hear it.” — Michael Trotter Jr.

“Michael and I have been working hard to make this tour a special opportunity for fans to unite through the power of love with our new music. We are so excited to have Kat & Alex and William Prince join us on the road and we are looking forward to creating some unforgettable moments together. There is no greater or higher calling in life than to be conduits of love and that’s exactly what Lover’s Game is to us. From the opening guitar riff to the last piano note on this record…love is the intention and love is the subject that can’t be ignored. We’ve been through every facet of it together and we could not be more excited to share another layer of our story.” — Tanya Trotter

The War and Treaty Bring Their Love to ‘Healing Tide’

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More often than not, it seems, the telling of the story of the War and Treaty begins with the war, specifically a piano in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. It is a tantalizing tale, and we’ll get to that.

But this time, let’s start with the Treaty: the moment Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Blount first met and two formidable talents took hold in life and in music.

“We have probably two different accounts,” Michael says by phone from Nashville, Tanya audible in the background, laughing as she agrees with the prediction.

Spoiler alert: There is to be much laughter in the ensuing chat, from giggles to hearty peals, and much weighing in from whoever doesn’t have hold of the receiver. And some tears and choking up too. It’s a real delight, everything up-front and on the table, just as anyone who has seen them perform would expect, and every bit of it captured in their new debut album, Healing Tide, a wonder of gospel-soul-country-rock-folk carried on their from-the-heart vocals, both of them capable of gale-force belting and whispered-breeze tenderness, sometimes, somehow, both at once.

It’s a love story through and through, evidenced in song titles along: “Love Like There’s No Tomorrow” (the album’s foot-stomping gospel invocation), “Are You Ready to Love Me?,” (swampy Southern soul), “Here Is Where the Loving Is” (fiddles and guitars and Emmylou Harris!) among them. And a belief that love is contagious, that it can repair the world — the boisterous title song (a bit of Ike and Tina and a lot of Delaney & Bonnie, perhaps), the steamed-windows twinkle of “Jeep Cherokee Laredo.” And in “One and the Same” they have given us unity anthem for the ages. All of the ages. And in album-closing “Little New Bern,” Michael wrote a vivid ode to Tanya’s large, loving family and the former plantation land where it began and at which all the cousins still gather with her grandparents (73 years of marriage!) every summer.

But back to that meeting: “I remember going to Laurel Lakes Park for an event, the Love Festival, Aug. 28, 2010,” he says of a day of music in Laurel, Maryland, near where each lived at the time, at which they were both scheduled to perform. “I was led under this awning and I saw this most beautiful woman I ever saw in my life.”

A “wow” is heard in the background, as if she’s never heard this before.

“And she did what any beautiful woman would have done with a slouch like me. She ignored me,” he says. “We introduced ourselves and she thought nothing of me. I thought everything of her. So I got on stage and performed, and then after I saw this woman running across the field in heels toward the stage, and it was her. She just wanted to know about my songwriting. The rest is history.”

Tanya grabs the phone: “He’s kinda telling the truth,” she allows. “Mine is the part where he says I ignored him. I was out there with some friends and a young lady working with me at the festival kind of whisked me away and said, ‘I want you to meet Michael.’ Which kind of came as he said it. It may come off as I was ignoring him. But I wasn’t. I was trying to do two things at once.”

As to her reaction to his songs, well, on that she agrees wholeheartedly.

“Oh my goodness! I lost my mind!” she says. “After he finished performing I ran over and bought six of the CDs he had and was a crazy person handing them out to people — ‘This is the best thing I’ve heard!’ He was amazing.”

And then?

“We exchanged numbers — and he would have a different account here,” Tanya says. “He lost my number! Threw it in the trash can. So I proceeded to call him and ask him if he could write songs for my brother and I. We were working on a project. I invited him over to the house. He wrote 10 songs in about two hours. He had songs ready, came over and sang them to me and we became friends, inseparable friends. And after I had a birthday party, that was September of 2010, and from there, the next day, we never separated. He moved into my house the next day.”

Michael’s take?

“You know? That’s accurate.”

Okay, then. Now let’s skip ahead to March this year, when the couple, having made their home in Albion, Michigan, found themselves in Nashville, being produced by Buddy Miller at his house — “We wanted to give Buddy Miller a chance to be discovered,” Michael says, barely containing silly giggles. “Just wanted to help him out” — and surrounded by such stellar musicians as drummer Brady Blade, fiddler Sam Bush, pedal steel and banjo player Russ Pahl and multi-instrumentalist Jim Hoke, realizing the love-filled vision they’d been honing tirelessly in the intervening years.

Oh, and there’s Emmylou Harris climbing the porch stairs, not only to add her voice to “Here Is Where the Loving Is At,” but to deliver a batch of birthday brownies to Michael one day.

“Another lady who might need to be discovered,” Michael says, not succeeding at holding back the giggles, before adding, “Everyone knows her for her singing, but people don’t know she makes the BEST BROWNIES EVER.”

The sound is a realization of an array of influences and passions, some shared ones including Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, the gospel icons the Gaither Singers and James Cleveland. A big influence when they started performing together, Michael says, was the Civil Wars — he sheepishly notes running into that act’s John Paul White and, tongue-tied, blurting out that his act was called the Civil Wars. But what the War and Treaty draw on together is distinctly their musical DNA.

“We really have different backgrounds,” Tanya says. “My mom was from Panama. I grew up listening to Calypso and opera. My dad was from New Bern, North Carolina, and we also listened to Christian music, gospel, but also secular music — Whitney Houston. A plethora of sounds growing up. My dad loved western, so some country songs. We would have a guitar player in church, or sometimes just foot-stomping and clapping. ‘Love Like There’s No Tomorrow’ comes from that. Michael comes from a Seventh Day Adventist background and grew up listening to incredible harmonies and some of his writing comes out of that. His uncle Zilbert Trotter plays organ like no one I ever heard before. We took all that and married it together and it came together with the help of Buddy Miller as a beautiful piece of art.”

Though they’d made a well-received EP, Down to the River, spawning some viral videos to match the word-of-mouth from their dynamic concert performances, this was a whole other world for them, with new expectations, intimidating ones.

“When you get those musicians in the room, they know that no matter what accolades they have, they say, ‘Lead us,’” Michael says. “I had to learn to lead. Buddy Miller is not going to let you escape that responsibility. You come in and have a vision, he’s going to hold you to it. He’s a sweet man, but he has a way to make sure you stay authentic. He’s not going to do take 17, take 18. We did two takes of everything. We had it in the first one. Did the second one because Buddy felt guilty that we had it in the first one.”

He continues, “They all wanted to see where I wanted to go — show us what you’ve got. The intimidation factor was sky high. I don’t consider myself of the caliber of those giants, but then you have to believe you belong there. I remember playing my minor 7ths and diminished chords and this and that and they were laughing, had to explain to me what I was doing. Russ Pahl said, ‘How does it feel to have millions of dollars of education, and never gone to school a day in your life?’ I said, ‘Feels pretty good, Russ.’ He popped me on the head with a wad of paper and walked away.”

The closest he had ever gotten to a music education was under the most unusual circumstances, which brings us back to Saddam’s piano. Michael, having enlisted in the Army in 2003, was sent to Iraq, scared and unprepared. He found himself in a platoon stationed in one of Hussein’s abandoned palaces. A captain heard him sing, heard the inspirational power of his voice and took him to the basement where there was a piano and told him to go at it, learn to play, make music. Not long after, the captain was killed and Michael was asked to sing at his service, the first time he ever sang a song he wrote in public.

But as he talks here, that wasn’t the part of the Iraq story he wanted to tell.

“No one knows this,” he confides. “This is special. I was singing in Baghdad once, and it was probably two in the morning, singing to the troops. And they were singing and clapping with me. And one of the soldiers on guard duty said, ‘You all gotta come see this!’ And when I looked over the gate, the Iraqis with their tea were sitting down at the gate, listening to me sing. And they were clapping and patting their thighs with me. That’s the power of music, the power of songwriting. The war stopped for at least 30 minutes.”

That’s the kind of thing he remembers as his and Tanya’s life accelerates, as success builds and the demands grow — not least being having to spend more time away from their child.

“I’ve cried on the road and broken down,” Michael says. “We travel with our son, but time has now come where we have to leave him with someone for two or three weeks at a time, all for the call of the mission and honoring our life.”

That mission. That call.

“I’m singing with my wife, songs I wrote for us, and we’re on the road and helping bridge humanity in our way. Toughest thing we have to deal with is leaving our son. But no one’s calling us derogatory words.”

He cites a couple of rough epithets that in past have been hurled at many from various directions.

“No one is doing that. There are no signs that you have to drink from the black water fountain. That’s not happening,” he says. “We are blessed that we have not faced it that way. We have a multi-cultural band that reminds folks of what we have overcome. I’m not here to promote the black race or white race, but am genuinely invested in unifying the human race. I do believe there ain’t no better thing in life. I’m almost coming to tears just thinking about if Dr. King’s dream can be a reality daily. We make sure at every concert that everyone hugs each other and tells each other they matter, black or white, foreign or domestic. We are all human beings.”

As the song says, with equal grace and power, we are all “One and the Same.”

Tanya puts it simply and profoundly: “This project is an act of love.”

Photo credit: David McClister

LISTEN: The War and Treaty, “If It’s in Your Heart”

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Artist: The War and Treaty (Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Blount-Trotter)
Hometown: Albion, Michigan
Song: “If It’s in Your Heart”
Album: Healing Tide
Release Date: August 10, 2018
Label: Strong World/Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “I had a friend who went through a terrible ordeal. I asked if she was ok and she said ‘yes’ but the truth was that she wasn’t and I felt it but didn’t act on it. ‘If It’s in Your Heart’ is everything I should’ve said to her to let her know that I was willing to go through the rain with her. I should’ve challenged her more and that’s what the song is about.” – Michael Trotter Jr.

Photo credit: David McClister