Watchhouse (Duo) - Essay by Allison Hussey

It used to be that you’d only ever see Emily Frantz and Andrew Marlin as a duo. From the start, it was always them, together: standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder on an otherwise empty stage, making sleight-of-hand overdubs in the studio, dropping into the coffee shop.

The first time I saw them was in November 2009, opening for Chatham County Line at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro just a few months after they’d decided to try being a band called Mandolin Orange. They seemed scared to be there. A few months later, they were in a repurposed restaurant that had previously been home to a Rocky & Bullwinkle theme restaurant; a picket-fence backdrop had been painted black behind them. They’ve played in sticky-floored rock clubs, theaters big and small, in open fields and under the stars. They’ve played with two or three or several more friends in some of music history’s most hallowed haunts. Every scene has been its own story.

Emily and Andrew grew up separately steeped in the music that they would first approximate directly, and start to develop into new forms all their own. They convened a small town with a charming name and a big college, following a mutual affection for music (and each other), choosing a band name to match their earnest young spirits. Their very first album together was circulated in cardboard covers that had been printed with thick ink applied by hand; you could e-mail Mandolin Orange at a Gmail address listed on a printer-paper insert.

As their imaginations grew together, so, too, did their ability to intertwine their creative strengths. They moved from one quiet little room to another, and as more people kept following them there, those rooms got bigger. Even in stormy times, the songs reflected the ways that love could be a curse, a wilted clover, a comfort as light as cotton sheets. The clouds cleared, and the roots grew deeper. Old friends returned to the fold over and over again, and new ones necessarily joined the jubilations.

Along the way, the band became not just a metaphorical family, but a literal one. The world changed as they did, and with them, their songs changed, too. They looked at intolerable tragedies and weathered the aches of adult life. But they also uncovered great joy: the sort that comes from a knowing, trusting love, one that has withstood not only the usual trials of time and growing up, but also years of juggling creative ambitions with pragmatic work, crummy hotel rooms, long drives in a Honda Odyssey, and, on one occasion, bedbugs.

There was only one occasion where I had any concern about Andrew and Emily’s uphill climb, but it short-lived and circumstantial, not to mention entirely too literal. Through a series of circumstances not worth unraveling, I found myself driving a golf cart carrying Andrew, Emily, their gear, and their manager, Jimmy, from one end of a music festival to another. Our destination was a high, grassy outcrop with a fantastic view of the North Carolina foothills, and my foot lay flat on the pedal against the floor as the Little Golf Cart That Could wheezed its way up the black pavement.

I was terrified of dropping them and their gear off the steep incline, and I think they were, too. They gamely did not say so. It took some rumbling and rattling—possibly some prayer—but we got up there intact. Maybe there’s a nice metaphor in there somewhere, about how, through hanging on and believing and being steady and careful, everything will turn out okay in the end. Mostly I’m still grateful that a guitar didn’t go clattering down an asphalt incline.

A new chapter opened with Watchhouse, the present-day vehicle where songs come to life with glistens of electric guitar, light percussion, and sweeping, textured layers of strings. It sounds different, in some obvious ways—bigger, brighter, more panoramic. But its heart is the same. It will always be Emily and Andrew.

What Watchhouse (Duo) captures is a pair of people who have spent more than a decade investing in each other as individuals, as fellow musicians, as a pair of partners building a long future together. But these songs are extensions of the people who wrote them, together, and Duo is a way to hear a whole decade collapsed into less than an hour. It’s both sides, now: the eager young couple who had no idea of what they were stepping into, and the wiser, more worldly travelers they turned out to be—and every day, are still becoming.