Yes! Weekly - June 21, 2017 by YES! Weekly

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HEAR IT!

Greensboro’s Magpie Thief play Winston-Salem

BY JOHN ADAMIAN | @johnradamian

he Greensboro duo Magpie Thief had some hard-to-ignore, real-life events shaping the music they made last year. Singer, songwriter and banjo player Emily Stewart had a cat that was killed by a neighbor’s unrestrained, aggressive dog. This was the second cat Stewart had lost to the dog. She was pissed. It was seeping into her music. Meanwhile, her collaborator, Matty Sheets, grappled with a hardto-pin-down medical ailment. Magpie Thief play two area shows this weekend, one at Test Pattern in Winston-Salem on June 24, and at On Pop of the World Studios in Greensboro on June 26. Stewart, who practices reiki and other naturalistic forms of healing in WinstonSalem, isn’t normally a confrontational person prone to violent anger. But the loss of her cat and indifference of her neighbor stirred her up. The rage fueled some musicmaking. “I got a little irate with the neighbor. The cops showed up,” Stewart said. “We walked back into the house and my mother-in-law goes ‘Wow, you really went Alabama on his ass.’” Stewart, 33, was raised in Alabama. Evidently, the decibel level on her voice bumped up a few notches when she was expressing herself to her neighbor. Not long after that incident, Stewart and Sheets were set to practice. Stewart had fleshed out some lyrics that included a line about “going Alabama” on someone’s

Emily Stewart and Matty Sheets make up the duo of Magpie Thief. ass. Sheets had a riff that Stewart liked. They fused the two and came up with the core of “Alabama Loud,” the first tune on the latest Magpie Thief E.P., Say What You Mean, which came out at the end of 2016. The newest recording has more layers, with drumming and the drive of a rhythm section in places, and a hint more muscle, though the music is still essentially mellow and easy-rolling. The idea of using music — the weight of the lyrics, the physicality of singing — as a way of channeling emotion and getting in touch with one’s body, these are things that Stewart had been thinking about for years. Allowing music to serve as an escape hatch for what you might call dark energy is probably healthier than just letting bad feelings fester and stew. “Alabama Loud” ended up functioning as a way to explore the welling up of an-

ger in the body. Stewart had long thought of singing her songs as related to chanting a mantra, a way of getting one’s breath in sync with one’s mind. You can almost hear her savouring in her mouth each slowdrawl syllable and melodic slide or swoop when she sings. Magpie Thief is an acoustic duo and they play blues-tinged Americana, a little old timey, a little folky. They’re not a punk outfit, but Sheets and Stewart consider the venting of emotion to be central to what they do. They want to radiate a kind of sonic candor. The pair came together in 2014 after each had backed the other in different projects. So they knew each other’s songs and they knew they both wanted to make music and take it out on the road. That’s what they’d been busy doing up until the fall of 2016. Sheets, 41, had his own weighty truths

to excavate and process. A prolific multiinstrumentalist and active musical collaborator in the Greensboro music scene for decades, Sheets learned that he had multiple sclerosis last year. It took a while to figure out what was wrong. “It started in my legs,” Sheet said. “I was feeling this weak numbness in my legs. Eventually I started feeling it in my hands, and my legs never got better.” The real indicator that something was seriously wrong came when Sheets was playing a gig with Stewart and he found himself unable to get his hand to quickly shape a chord on the guitar, something he’d done probably tens of thousands of times over the past 20 years. That led to an urgent-care visit and a recommendation to see a neurologist, and a second opinion. In the end, the diagnosis was a kind of relief for Sheets, who had

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12 YES! WEEKLY

JUNE 21-27, 2017