Nashville’s new Rock band,“Hippies and Cowboys,” have their sights set on the horizon as original songwriters, while working to make their mark on Rock and Roll, with their own blend of music that they dub “Memphis Sound Rhythm and Blues” with a modern flare.   Lead Singer/Guitarist Aaron Sparling, Bass Player Kevin Corbo, and Lead Guitarist Andrew Lambie, know each other well having played together for quite a few years, before relocating to Nashville, where they have added Drummer Scott Metko and Keyboardist Nolan Brown, to complete the lineup for the now five-piece Rock band.

               While the band is young, they have already been establishing themselves around the Nashville circuit, playing cover gigs at popular venues downtown, such as Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk, The Johnny Cash Museum and Nudie’s Honky Tonk, to name a few, but they also travel frequently, to play at venues in their hometowns of Kokomo, Indiana, Appleton, Wisconsin and Detroit, Michigan, where they are building another fan base outside of Music City. 

               While the band would prefer to be playing their own original music — eventually, that is the goal — the cover gigs have helped to not only get them noticed, but also to make connections with some notable professionals in the music industry, such as producer Jim Kaufman, who helped master and mix one of Aaron’s 1^st singles,“Run With Me.” The song was also engineered by John Gifford, III (Duane Allman, Alicia Keys), of the infamous Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.  I sat down recently with Aaron, Kevin, Andrew and Scott, to talk about their musical influences, songwriting, goals and ultimate vision for the band and their music.

LTHN:    For each of you, what inspired you to become a musician when you were younger?

KEVIN:   My story isn’t terribly interesting.  Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I figured I would have an opportunity to meet people if I played music, so that’s pretty much what influenced me.

ANDREW:  He still doesn’t make any friends.  [Laughter]

AARON:  Smiling We all hate him.  We just put up with him, because we needed a bass player.

KEVIN:  No, they love me – they love me to death.

AARON:  They do, in all honesty, but he’s the punching bag at times. 

AARON:  I had always had a natural “thing” or “calling” to want to play music.  My Dad’s side of the family is pretty musically inclined, but nobody ever did anything with it, but strum a few chords on the guitar, sing some melodies or something. Since I was about 3 or 4 years old, I’ve always had a fascination with instruments, pianos, drums, whatever.  I was always banging on shit, so I don’t know.  I just grew up with the fascination of wanting to play music.  I always loved music and hearing live music, and watching bands, so from a young age, I knew what I wanted to do, so I’m just trying to make it happen.

LTHN:  Are you self-taught?

AARON:  I have never taken a lesson.  I took like 2 or 3 lessons to learn how to play triads on the guitar, and after that, that was it.

ANDREW:  He still doesn’t know what a triad is (laughing).

AARON:  Yeah, exactly.  I was completely self-taught. 

LTHN:  Who would you say was your greatest influence?

AARON:  I would have to pick three.  When I first started hearing The Beatles with my cousin Andrew, I was hooked.  That really got me into a lot of the great music that I love, because I went from the Beatles, to being into The Doors, to Led Zeppelin, and then obviously stemming from The Beatles, you get Paul McCartney and Wings and their other solo careers.  There’s so much great music that came from the Beatles, individually or together.  I think that I would have to give that a lot of credit, and then I really dug into The Eagles and Tom Petty.

KEVIN:  I think collectively we can all agree The Eagles are probably our biggest influence.

ANDREW:  For the record, I would say our biggest influence would be Otis Redding.

KEVIN:  Motown.

ANDREW:  The Motown era and The Beatles, are probably our greatest influences.

AARON:  Yeah, I’d say definitely, Otis Redding, and just that Memphis sound, in general. I mean, there are so many different artists… The Memphis sound of Sam and Dave, Otis, and The Blues Brothers.  We’re just really trying to recapture that great era of music, but with a modern flair. We want to keep up with the times, but more importantly, not really be that worried about anything else but the music and the music being good. I’m a firm believer that if you have a good product, and something that’s marketable, people will enjoy it, whether it’s a timeless, or modern production. It’s just about having good music, a good attitude about it, and really believing in it. That’s another thing, you’ve got to really believe in it, and you’ve got to be able to really sell it.  You can write a good song, but if you can’t sell the song, and live and be the song, you’re never going to do much with it.

Also, I feel like this is something really important that we have, that we really believe in the songs that we write, and really try to do our best to make them come alive to their full potential, with every song we write or record.

LTHN:  How is that process – the songwriting process?  Do you guys typically write the lyrics first?

AARON:  I mean, it just depends on how the song is written. Sometimes, one of us might be at home, and come up with a riff on the guitar or the piano, or, another way may be, one of us might have the whole song written, and will go and show it to the guys. We all kind of just come up with our own parts, put them all together, and make it into one. I mean, we all kind of write and produce the songs, and all that together.

ANDREW:  The songwriting part, the writing part of it, that’s different for everyone, because we have songs that Nolan has written, songs we co-wrote, and songs that Aaron would take the track or the demo, and go off and write it on his own. In terms of the music, we all kind of sit down together, and make a whole song happen, and hear it out that way together.

AARON:  We’ve got a lot of horns… like horn sections on our stuff too.  We already have a five-piece band.  The whole vision of what we really want to tour with would probably be a seven- or eight- piece band, because we’re going to have a horn section — trumpet and saxophone — that already puts us at seven, and then depending on whether we add another guitar player or a backup singer, whatever, we’re just going to have a big band, just to have that whole sound. That’s another thing that a lot of people aren’t doing anymore too, because it’s hard to navigate a big band like that, and keep something like that going.  It’s just really hard to get a band like that together in general.  You’ve got to have something special going on, to get people to be in that big of a band, you know, and to really be in it full- time is really hard.  So, it’s hard enough to keep five guys together, let alone eight.

LTHN:  What are your ultimate goals for the band?  What would you like to see happen?

AARON:  I’d say definitely a horn section full-time would be pretty cool.

LTHN:  Career-wise for the band…. do you want to get signed with a major label, or is that not a big deal anymore?   What are your career goals?

AARON:  Ultimately, yeah, I definitely think we’d be wanting to sign with a label.  I think Andrew is going to say, that by the end of next year, the goal is to be just solely doing this without having to do any cover gigs.

ANDREW:  Yeah, to be really doing our own shows.

AARON:  To be able to tour and open up for national acts, and ultimately become a national act ourselves.  I mean, I would still probably do Broadway and Kid Rock’s, even if we were doing our own shows.  Like I said, our goals are, I feel, like everybody else’s career goals, you know, everybody wants to be able to do this as their full-time job, travel the country, and spread the word of their music.

LTHN:  Would you go to Europe?

ANDREW/AARON:  Oh yes, absolutely.

ANDREW:  If they ever let me back (laughter).

AARON:  We really work hard towards the end, you know.  Another thing we do is, we actually invest into the band.  We put money into the project. That’s the one thing that a lot of people just don’t understand. You can’t just get yourself a band, and put out music, and not put any money behind it, because it’s just not going to work. Whether you’re paying for it, or the label’s paying for it, somebody is always paying for it, so when you don’t have a label, who else is going to pay for it, except for everybody collectively in the band?  We’re going to do as much as we can on our own, until we’re at a point where we can’t do it all anymore. 

LTHN:  You did a photoshoot in Vegas recently.  What was that about?

AARON:  Yeah, we went out to Las Vegas to do some cover art and photos for the record, just to have content, really, because we didn’t have a lot of content.  We really wanted to go with the theme of “Hippies and Cowboys,” like a desert, you know, so we went out there and did a bunch of cowboy stuff, and had a good time.  We plan on doing an early release of the full record, a limited edition on vinyl, of about 300. That’ll be out early, before any streaming services are available, so we will plan to probably put that out, maybe a month or two before the real release date, when it’ll be available on all social platforms and all that.  Also, before the record, we’re probably going to put out a little teaser of the single I plan on doing, like a 30 second clip or something, just to kind of give a little preview of it with a little video, also.

LTHN:  Is there anything you want readers and your fans to know about you?

AARON:  Just collectively, our mission is to make good music, and create a fan base full of people that love each other, and just want to have a good time, and to keep Rock and Roll and Soul music alive, because it’s still a huge part of what we love to listen to. 

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Keep up with Hippies and Cowboys on Facebook at:   @hippiesandcowboysband