The Cactus Blossoms, Genre-Fusing Country-Folk Duo, Perform at Stagecoach Festival
This story was previously published by Coachella Valley Independent on March 30, 2022.
Take your parents' country and folk, add some fresh-indie flavor, and you've got The Cactus Blossoms.
Brothers Jack Torrey and Page Burkum are the singing/songwriting duo known as The Cactus Blossoms. For 10 years now, the band has been crafting a nostalgic, yet modern take on country and folk, led by the consistent vocal harmonies from both brothers. The duo just released "One Day," their third studio album, in February, and the LP's 11 tracks add even more steps in experimentation between their past influence and the current state of music. You can catch The Cactus Blossoms at Stagecoach Festival, Friday, April 29.
I recently spoke to Page Burkum over the phone about the band's upcoming performance.
"It feels good to be called for anywhere right now, after canceling tour after tour over the last couple years," shared Burkum. "It's just exciting to be back at it. We're based in Minneapolis, but going to that area in California is always a blast for us. It kind of feels like we're in a different country, in a great way, and we've always had really, really great audiences there. We have played Stagecoach before one other time, so we knew we were on their radar. I don't know how these things always work out, but we have a new record out now, so it seems like a good time to go back with something new."
"One Day" sees the brothers' collaboration taking a new form, after both were separated from each other for a while (You know why).
"My brother and I both wrote some songs that are on the new record, and there's several that we collaborated on," said Burkum. "There was a time of inactivity when touring got shut down, and we were kind of staying in our own homes right away. In a way, that was a nice break for a while, because we've been touring so much over the last few years. It was kind of nice to be home and get more well rested. I think maybe because we felt like we couldn't work together for a while, when we could get back together, it was extra fun and exciting to pull together a recording session and play with some of our bandmates that we hadn't been able to see or hang out with or make music with for a while. I think that added a little different energy to the whole project."
Another new form of collaboration took form in the last record, as The Cactus Blossoms worked with singer and actress Jenny Lewis on the song "Everybody."
"We've kind of done things in a tight way where we've worked with the same engineer the last few albums and we haven't brought in many producers, or worked with other artists directly like that," shared Burkum. "It'd be interesting to explore, and I hope we can collaborate with some more folks. Getting Jenny Lewis on board to do a song with us was a pretty great way to start. We're just such big fans of hers. My brother Jack wrote the song, 'Everybody' and he had the idea of just asking her to sing some verses on it. It's like a no brainer for us if she'd be interested. We knew she would sound really great on the song and we're just thrilled that she wanted to join in. For me, it was nice to hear somebody else having to hit the high notes on it."
After completing their first leg in 2 years, Burkum had some thoughts on the current state of live music.
Things aren't quite back to normal yet, but they're getting there.Page Burkum, The Cactus Blossoms
"I will say things aren't quite back to normal yet, but they're getting there," expressed Burkum. "It seems like people are starting to come out a little bit more now. We've had a lot of people coming up to us at shows saying, 'This is the first show I've even attended since the whole thing went down.' It's a mix of things going, everyone has different mask rules and different vaccination rules, and we're just kind of making our way across the country just doing it."
"For bands like us, who are not the biggest band, we're not playing huge places, we're playing relatively small clubs most of the time, I think it is kind of tough to plan things right now. If your audiences are cut in half, for instance, everywhere you go, that's a big difference. A lot of touring kind of feels like things are hanging by a thread anyway. What if your van breaks down? You have to cancel the whole tour cause you'll never catch up? There's a little bit of that anxiety that came back, but it all went pretty smoothly, and was super fun in the end."
The further the Cactus Blossoms experiment with the bridge between genres, the more they hope to stay true to their sound.
"When my brother and I first started playing together, we were playing local bars in Minneapolis, doing a lot of old country songs," said Burkum. "It was kind of just a fun thing to learn those tunes, and because we didn't have enough of our own material to fill any time, so we would do all sorts of old songs nobody's ever heard before. As we started writing more every couple of years, you end up with different kinds of songs over time. Some of our band lineup has changed over time too, so we always just create something a little bit different each time around, and we're fine with that. I think that there's always certain threads that are running through the whole thing; maybe us just singing harmony ties it all together, but I hope our music keeps changing."
What better way to stay rooted to your past than through your band name? Burkum described how the two words came to be, and represent their music.
"When we were doing all these country songs in the past, we wanted it to sound like a country band, so people, if they saw a poster up, would kind of have an idea of what kind of music we were," he said. "I do remember at the time thinking that we liked so many bands that were named things like the flat tires, or things that had a negative feel. I think that we liked that the cactus blossoms was kind of this hopeful image, this flower that's blooming in the barren desert."
