“And that was really fun.”Īs for the classic genres and styles that the songs are set in, that came after the writing process was done. “We would, in conversation, come up with a really clever song title and then have a go at writing something with that title,” Stewart says. It felt natural to me.”Īrnez and Stewart wrote nearly all the material on the Boyfriends’ two studio albums, but they approached the songs for Blue Cactus in a way they’d never done before. It’s kind of like what my voice is designed to do. I cast that music aside in my early 20s because it wasn’t cool at the time, or whatever, but I came around recently to realizing how amazing that music is and how much I enjoy writing and singing in that style.
“It felt like I was sort of like reclaiming my childhood in a way. “There’s a real nostalgia for me,” she says. Though she grew up in the ’90s listening to superstar country singers like Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, and Reba McEntire, a close friend of hers introduced her to Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash around the same time. It was nice to experiment.”įor Stewart, the classic county genre is personal.
I think it was really fun for us to dabble in little bits of the country aesthetics that we enjoy and not commit to one. “We’ve had a lot of fun adding the Nashville-sound kind of strings, but we also enjoy the more basic stuff, the rock-country stuff you get with the Bakersfield sound. “I feel like one of my favorite things about country is that there are so many different aesthetics that you can experiment with,” she says. Once the duo decided on that throwback sound, Stewart says there was a lot for Blue Cactus to choose from. We like all sorts of music, but we love that classic country.” “So it got more into Steph and I doing more duo gigs, and that eventually evolved into moving away from acoustic to writing more classic country-inspired material. “Some of the other guys were getting busier, and we weren’t able to consistently say yes to gigs with the whole band,” Arnez says of the Boyfriends. Regardless, both in sound and look, Blue Cactus is also pretty far from the pair’s previous Appalachian string-band, Steph Stewart & Her Boyfriends. There’s even some vintage Loretta Lynn-style wordplay on the serves-you-right anthem “So Right (You Got Left).” Complementing Blue Cactus’ consciously stylized music, Stewart and Arnez have adopted a throwback wardrobe of matching patterned shirts and cowboy boots. It features a gently picked backing track with layered backing vocals swaying underneath Stewart’s wounded, heartbroken twang.Īnother track, the Arnez-sung “Anymore Something (Like Anyone’s Someone)” folds a weeping pedal steel and an almost waltz-like Western swing beat into the mix, and “Pearl” adds some Bakersfield honky-tonk grit. Blue Cactus, a new duo formed by Steph Stewart and Mario Arnez, calls their sound “modern classic country,” but the cool thing about what they do is that it’s no one specific style of classic country.įor instance, the opening track on their self-titled album, “I Never Knew Heartache (Then I Knew You),” sounds for all the world like some lost Patsy Cline tune.
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