Everybody in your life will write his or her own chapter in your story. Take a step back, and you’ll see the influence of your loved ones, mentors, and friends in your decisions. Shook Twins refer to these folks in the title of their fourth album, Some Good Lives. Throughout fourteen tracks, the duo—identical twin sisters Katelyn Shook [vocals, guitar] and Laurie Shook [banjo, vocals]—pay homage to everyone from a late grandpa and godfather to Bernie Sanders.
“We realized there was a theme,” Katelyn reveals. “Even though our minds are mostly on the women of today and wanting the monarchy to rise up, we have several men in our lives who have been such positive forces. We wanted to thank them and honor the good guys who showed us the beauty in this crazy world we live in. So, it’s an album for Some Good Lives that have crossed paths with ours—and to them, we are grateful.” Laurie agrees, “It’s also an acknowledgment of our thankfulness of the good life that we get to live.”
However, the pair derived their own strength from these relationships. Over the course of three full-length releases and a handful of EPs since 2008, acclaim would come by way of everyone from USA Today and Baeble Music to Langhorne Slim, The Lumineers, Mason Jennings, and iconic best-selling author Neil Gaiman who enthusiastically decreed, “They make music that twines through your soul the way vines cover an abandoned shack in the woods.” They captivated crowds at High Sierra Music Festival, Lightning In A Bottle, Bumbershoot, Hulaween, Summer Camp Music Festival, and Northwest String Summit, to name a few.
During 2016, they planted the seeds for what would become Some Good Lives by thinking bigger. The girls intermittently recorded at Hallowed Halls in Portland, OR. Within this old library building they tapped into palpable energy like never before, locking into a groove inside of the spacious, reverberant live room. Moreover, the full band—Barra Brown [drums], Sydney Nash [bass], and Niko Slice [guitar, mandolin]—expanded the sonic palette. “It took us a long time to find the band that we wanted to record these songs with and for the songs to fully mature,” admits Laurie. “Once Barra, Sydney, and Niko joined us, we really started to explore what our music could be. These amazing players helped us realize that we could be more than just ‘folk pop’. We started adding other genres to the word like ‘disco,’ ‘psychedelic,’ ‘funk,’ and ‘soul.’ We really honed in on a new sound.”
