Shovels and Rope, with Carolina Story. 8:30 p.m. Oct. 17. $10. The Earl, 488 Flat Shoals Ave. S.E., Atlanta. 404-522-3950, www.badearl.com.
When singer-songwriters Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent married in 2009 they never planned on becoming a musical duo.
They’d been in different bands when they first met, and they each went on to record solo albums. She’d even landed a song, “Hell’s Bells,” on HBO’s “True Blood.”
But touring and making ends meet was much more of a struggle until Hearst and Trent melded their careers in Shovels and Rope — a stripped-down dyad that has them switching off on guitar and drums to bang out a sound that messes around with folk, country, blues and rock in songs that run from raucous to bittersweet.
The couple will play at the Earl in East Atlanta on Oct. 17, promoting their debut album, “O’ Be Joyous.”
Recently, during a rare vacation from the road, Hearst and Trent joined a conference call on separate cellphones as they walked around their home in Charleston, S.C., and talked about Shovels and Rope.
“Sorry. We’ve got a rooster out here,” Trent said at one point, apologizing for a sudden ruckus.
“Yeah,” Hearst chimed in, laughing. “He’s unruly. I don’t know what’s gotten into him. He’s a bantam rooster and all of his hens are big chickens, so I think he’s got that Napoleon syndrome going.”
Their back and forth is a lot like the music they make together.
He’s a Colorado guy who played in a clever indie rock band called the Films. She’s a Tennessee girl who recorded a sassy duet, “Another Like You,” with Nashville outlaw Hayes Carll.
On “Birmingham,” the rousing opener of “O’ Be Joyful,” they sing about their relationship as a kind of epic American journey: “Rockmount cowboy in a rock and roll band, plugged his amplifier in all across the land. Athens, Georgia, on a Friday night, saw that little girl, she could sing alright.”
“The gist of it is a catch-up for the listeners,” Hearst said. “It’s sort of a way to let them know what’s going on here. A lot of the song is true, but a lot of things are psychedelicized.”
“It really was never part of the plan to be in a band together,” Trent said. “We were planning on being married but not together musically.”
Necessity was the mother of invention, they agreed.
“It happened organically because we were paying our bills back home by playing in bars as a duo while pursuing our national efforts and trying to break out separately,” Hearst said. “But then people started to ask for the duo and asked us to tour.
“So we took the act on the road and it soon became very clear that it was an efficient way to travel. We have our dog and each other. It brings a certain domesticity that’s otherwise absent from tour life.”
Trent produced and engineered the basic tracks for “O’ Be Joyful” at the couple’s home studio. But much of the writing and the recording of several additional tracks was done on the road.
“We both came with a handful of songs and, being that we’d been traveling so much together, we naturally started working things out in the van and passing things back and forth,” Hearst said.
Nashville filmmakers the Moving Picture Boys captured Hearst and Trent touring and recording “O’ Be Joyful” for a documentary that’s being edited with the couple’s cooperation.
“We were just interested in doing a couple of real quick, kind of live videos with them,” Trent said. “But later they asked if they could do a documentary about us. And they ended up following us around for about two years.
“I think it’s a good picture of working-class musicians in this day and age and what they do to get by and how they make it happen. That we happen to be a married couple makes it even more interesting, I guess.”
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