Folk bluegrass duo The Rough & Tumble consists of Mallory Graham and Scott Tyler. They've been performing for over 15 years together, the last eight of which have been spent traveling America's highways, byways and bars.
They recently decided to call Haverhill, New Hampshire, their new home — so we asked them to drop by to be the latest guests for Live from Studio D.
Rick Ganley: I hear you guys are locals now.
Mallory Graham: We are locals. Or as local as they come.
Scott Tyler: Haverhill. Haverhill, New Hampshire.
Via Nashville.
Graham: Via Nashville. Yeah.
Tyler: Yeah. Like all of the roads that go out of Nashville…we spent about eight years living in a 16-foot camper.
So was it just literally eight years on the road just touring the country?
Graham: Yeah. Our landlord [in Nashville] had left us without heat during an ice storm. We were like, we're done with this. And we sold everything and bought this little 16-foot camper, and the lot salesman, when we went to buy it — because we weren't like… we were poor, I would say. When the lot salesman sold it to us, he's like, “This is really for like two weekends a year. You don't want to live in this.” And we're like, “Marvin, we got it covered. What could go wrong?” And then, you know, eight years later, it's held together by duct tape. But it's still rolling.
Tyler: Moving down the road.
It's an amazing adventure, I'm sure. But not to get too personal here, but being together, working together, living in a van together.
Graham and Tyler: Yeah. Uh huh, yeah, yeah.
And you obviously still like each other…. So that's good.
Graham: Yeah. We also went to acting school. [Laughs]
Tyler: No, I mean, yeah… Things get…get really intimate, really personal, really quick in a tiny space like that.
And you kept dogs in there, too.
Graham: Two dogs, two 100-pound rescue dogs, both mastiff mixes.
You have mastiffs in a van for eight years together?
Graham: Yeah.
But I mean, what an unbelievable, fertile ground for creativity. What do you learn from those eight years on the road? What do you take away from it?
Graham: Get a better camper; listen to Marvin.
Tyler: Always listen to the lot salesman.
I mean, touring when we did — we left in 2015 and we got off the road in 2022. And I think it was a really interesting time in America to tour. I think we just learned that, you know, that people do want to help and they are, I think, more quick to help than to harm.
How did you tour? How did you perform during the pandemic?
Graham: We were also very fortunate during the pandemic because people reached out to us and asked how they could help us… and we didn't know.
A couple of people suggested song commissions, so we ended up writing an incredible amount during the pandemic because people were commissioning songs. And that's primarily how we stayed afloat financially — but also how we stayed afloat emotionally, because there's nothing quite as intimate and quite as connecting as taking on somebody else's story and writing it out for them and then presenting it back to them, as well, for their approval.
So can you give me an example of that, of how folks during the pandemic reached out and commissioned you to, to write songs to reflect their experiences?
Graham: There was this one woman in Florida. She was a nurse at the time, and she had a young teenage daughter. She was a single mom and her daughter was freaking out, obviously, because her mom was leaving every day to go to this place, into this, you know, this chaos. And the mom asked us if we would write a song for her daughter. And at first we were like, “Yeah, we can write a song that's like, everything's going to be OK.” And she's like, “No, I need you to write a song that lets her know that she is afraid right now, and that's totally normal. Those are normal feelings to be having.” And so we ended up writing this song called Hard Times.
So how did writing these commissioned songs during the worst of the pandemic inform your current work, especially now that COVID seems to be in the rear view?
Tyler: Yeah, so we just released this new album called Only This Far. And it's, I mean, the first song was like the first kind of non-commissioned song that we wrote in 2020. It's the song Ain't That The Way that we performed this morning. And it ends with the lines, “I'm going to be all right. I'm going to be all right.”
I think we all are coming out of the pandemic just as different people. And that was just something that we cling to — this hope that, you know, we're going to be OK. We're going to be all right.
It's a mantra.
Graham: It is a mantra. So [for] that song, also, we filmed a music video up in our now-hometown. And we asked — it was like our first month there — we sent out an email to all the listserv saying, like, “Hey, we want to film a music video and we don't know anyone here. So could somebody just show up and play a game of rock, paper, scissors with us?” And 80 people showed up at the end. We asked them to sing that line with us. We asked them to sing, “I'm going to be all right,” all together. And I don't think I realized the impact of that line until I was looking out at 80 people swaying and singing, “I'm going to be all right.” It's a moving thing to sing with an entire crowd of people after the few years that we've had.
