Auger Down Records

Red Heart the Ticker Biography
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Red Heart the Ticker is the musical collaboration of Robin MacArthur and Tyler Gibbons, a husband and wife duo from Marlboro, Vermont. Their music, often compared to Will Oldham, Gillian Welch, and Iron and Wine, is, in many ways, a reconciliation between their verging musical tastes: Robin’s penchant for tradition influenced sixties folk and twangy, old-fashioned country music, (Dave Van Ronk, Loretta Lynn) and Tyler’s love of jazz fusion and esoteric sixties rock (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Leonard Cohen). A couple long before they began playing music together, RHTT was born when, in 2005, they built themselves a cabin in the woods of Vermont and lived there without running water. As the long cold months of winter drew on they decided they would have to start playing music together to keep themselves from going batty with cabin fever. Red Heart the Ticker (red heart for warmth, ticker for rhythm,) is what was born.

“Our sound is born out of necessity, not some musical aesthetic,” Robin says. “We don’t always agree on what we like, musically, but where we overlap is where Red Heart the Ticker lies.” This musical terrain, rich with tight vocal harmonies, glockenspiel’s, dreamy guitar licks, banjoes, and hand claps, is both atmospheric and image rich. There is a strong sense of the north woods landscape in their songs, both lyrically and musically. “I found the place, a great wide field where we used to go, and make ourselves some pretty snow angels,” begins the song “Jackknives,” from their first album, For the Wicked.

In 2006 RHTT recorded and released For the Wicked, to critical acclaim. Paste Magazine, in a four star review, described their music as: “Exceptionally pretty folk songs…The pair’s songs are dim and haunting, full of winter melancholy, wispy melodies and plans for escape.” Pitchfork said their production illustrated, “the transformative power of their subject matter.” Their music was added to the rotation on KEXP (Seattle), and had airplay on numerous east coast stations including WXPN (Philadephia), WNYC (New York) and XM Radio. RHTT performed regularly in Philadelphia and New York, where they built a strong following, toured nationally, and performed with Cold War Kids, Dr. Dog, the folk singer Sam Amidon, and Stars Like Fleas, among others.

In the winter of 2008, RHTT began recording their second album, Oh My! Mountains Below, a quieter, more acoustic record. “We started writing these songs right after the death of my grandmother, so the songs, and thus the album, had a theme of death and transformation,” Robin says. Her grandmother, the folksinger Margaret MacArthur, influenced the subject matter and songwriting style as well. “She was a folk-singer in the old-fashioned meaning of the word; her songs told stories,” Robin says. “Ty and I were both consciously influenced by that on this record; we wanted to write songs that told stories of people’s lives and captured a sense of place.” They started recording the album in Robin’s grandparents’ two hundred year-old farmhouse in Vermont, in the same room where Margaret recorded her first album for folkways in 1962. “The walls are covered with old instruments,” Robin says, “fiddles and banjoes and dulcimers, which rattled while we were recording. The music is, literally, in and on the walls of that house.” They had friends come from London and New York to play cello, drums, and electric guitar with them. “Everyone slept in the drafty upstairs rooms of the house,” Tyler says, “and we drank a lot of whiskey and cider stonewalls to stay warm. Every day it snowed. It was an ethereal experience.”

A few weeks into recording Robin found out she was pregnant. From that point on, the recording of the album slowed down, and changed directions. That spring RHTT began writing new songs, and altering some of the ones they had already recorded. “We couldn’t get behind the purely dark direction we had been headed in,” Robin says. “Darkness, yes, but light, too. Death, but also re-birth, and the transformative nature of life.” The songs still had imagery of birds in flight, but now sometimes the birds were headed up, sometimes back down. RHTT worked on the album slowly but diligently for another eight months, adding the last vocal tracks in mid October. A week later, their daughter was born. “We seem to have had a nine month gestation period for everything,” says Robin. “Our record, our baby, and our cabin, which we were adding on to and closing in at the time.”

After spending some years in New York and Philadelphia, the duo now lives with their daughter in Vermont on the 250 acres of woods where Robin grew up, amidst her family of farmers and musicians and instrument makers. Gibbons and MacArthur have converted the one-room cabin they built when they were 25 into a small house with running water. They plan to hit the road often to play shows. “We are forked-hearted people, when it comes to place,” says Gibbons. “We love the woods where we have built our home, and we also love the raw edge of the cities where we’ve lived, and being on the road. It’s our hope that our music, as well as our lives, reflects that mix.”

Red Heart the ticker plans to spend the year after the release of Oh My! Mountains Below touring, playing lullabies to their daughter, and beginning their next musical project.