The A's Fruit

Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Meath have been yodeling together for upwards of fifteen years - in the backseat of a Prius while on their first cross-country tour, on back porches and backstages. It's what led them to Fruit, their debut release as The A's - a joyous ten-song collection spanning genre and decades, with interpretations of traditionals, lullabies, and an original song, it weaves between the weird and the wonderful."Why I'm Grieving," originally recorded by the DeZurik Sisters, was the inspiration for the A's existence. The A's reach into the past to hold hands with the DeZurik Sisters, two farm girls from rural Minnesota who taught themselves to yodel amongst all their animals, in a continuing celebration of the tradition of folk eccentricity and whimsy.The A's played their first show together in 2013 after Sauser-Monnig first moved to North Carolina, where Meath had been living at the time, but it wasn't until summer 2021 that they thought seriously about making Fruit. They decamped to Sylvan Esso's Chapel Hill studio, Betty's, for two weeks in the midst of a balmy and blooming Carolinian summer. They rehearsed during the day, deconstructing yodeling parts phonetically and staring absurdly into each other's eyes as they practiced tongue twisting harmonies - and recorded in the nighttime, candles lit, a flickering glow against the windows framing the violet twilight outside."There was a lot of giggling during the session," Sauser-Monnig explains. "At one point I was getting a tangle out of my hair and was like, oh, my God, that sounds really cool - the sound of my hands in my hair. And then I thought, what if we recorded hair for a percussion track? And then it just sort of snowballed."Across the record, the A's employ a bizarre-o ghost orchestra of strange noises that are percussive and melodic. The credits include nylon shorts, string (singular), hair, shoes, ice chunk, gravel, frog sample, and shoelace, among other unexpected makeshift instrumentation. The backing band is...