Family. Love. Harmony. They’re three simple words that can mean anything to pretty much everybody. But for The Harters, they embody a way of life that means just about everything. First and foremost, Michael, Leslie and Scott are siblings. And as brothers and sister, they share a familial love rooted in a lifetime of music. So far, pretty simple. Yet as country music has begun to discover – and their forthcoming debut album proves – The Harters play and sing together with a sound that soars beyond mere ‘harmonizing’ to the place where breakthrough artists are born. “Family, love and harmony all mean the same thing to us,” explains older brother Michael. “We’re three different people with one unifying approach. We don’t write, play, or sing conventionally, and our music can’t be ‘airbrushed’. We are,” he says with a laugh, “incapable of being anything other than exactly who we are.”It’s who The Harters are – individually and collectively – that make all the difference. “None of it would work without each one of us,” says sister Leslie. “Michael brings the traditional country sound. Scott’s comes from a more rock background. I listen to and love everything. And when we get together, there’s this weird magic that happens.” For younger brother Scott, it’s their diverse influences and personalities that create the unifying thread. “We’re all stubborn to a certain degree,” he explains, “and none of us are willing to be part of something we don’t believe in. I think of us as three circles that meet. Where they overlap is where our music is.”
The Harters were virtually born into music in their Arizona home, where their earliest childhood memories are of their father playing guitar and singing Beatles and Hank Williams songs. “We’d sit around the living room with our two older sisters Shannon and Brandy, listening to our dad, ” Leslie remembers. “After every song, the five of us would yell, ‘Do it again!’ Our mom is a really talented writer who taught us the importance of words and lyrics. Me, Michael and Scott just absorbed it all.” And while the Harter kids loved to bang on the family’s old upright piano, it was at their cabin on the outskirts of Flagstaff where the siblings’ true music gifts would coalesce. “We’d go there every weekend and all summer,” says Michael. “After our parents’ divorce, the cabin was our only constant.” By their early teens, they had begun to forge their indelible harmony – musical and otherwise – around a nearly constant campfire. “From the time we got up until the time we went to sleep, we would light a bonfire and sing,” Leslie says. “We still do. The cabin is a place that grounds you immediately to who you are and where you come from. ”
One night at their grandmother’s house, the current road became visible. “I’d moved back from Nashville,” Michael recalls, “and Leslie and I were thinking about being a duo. Scott had just come home from San Diego with some songs he’d written. The three of us started harmonizing on a song out on the back patio. After a while, my dad said, ‘I don’t know why you three don’t just sing together as a group.’ To our minds, the three of us singing and playing together was always just something we did around the campfire. Why would we try to do that professionally?” Still unsure, the three began a tentative collaboration. “When we first started doing this, we still didn’t know what we were,” says Scott. “Then came a song called ‘We All Fall Down’. The three of us sat down and wrote it, and these harmony parts just emerged. It was totally different from anything we’d ever done before. We’d found our sound. Suddenly we’d figured out that we didn’t have to be like anybody else. We could be us.”
What The Harters had found was a sound totally original and rooted in a bond that was wholly unbreakable. The three soon realized they were instinctive songwriters, able to craft inventive melodies and imaginative lyrics through some mystery combination of DNA and ESP. “When we get together, it just happens,” says Michael. “In fact, the majority of the album was written around the campfire in Flagstaff.” Scott and Michael lay down instrumentation both elegiac and insistent, Michael on their grandfather’s acoustic guitar and Scott on acoustic and electric guitar, mandolin and bouzouki. Individually, their vocals are as distinctive as their personalities – Michael’s clear and confident twang, reminiscent of vintage Garth; Scott’s warm yet versatile power, fusing back porch and barroom; and Leslie’s fearless melisma that channels a childhood obsession with her mom’s Patsy Cline records via Annie Lennox and The Cranberries. But it’s when the three come together in harmony that they create ‘The Harters’ Sound’: A pure country choral that can convey joy, pain and hope, often all within the same song. It is a startlingly beautiful and seamlessly natural harmony that surprises nobody more than The Harters themselves. “I’m not sure how the harmonies happen,” Leslie says. “If someone came along and asked us to teach them, we couldn’t. It’s always been second nature to us, and technically we don’t even sing harmony correctly. But it works like nothing else we’ve heard.”
Superstar songwriter/producer Keith Stegall would soon agree. “They played for me, and it was all there,” he says simply. “There were a lot of similarities to great records I grew up with, almost a reinvention of The Mamas & The Papas. Most of all, I liked their songs.” Stegall, producer of over 70 million records sold – including 14 albums by Alan Jackson – decided to record the group’s vocals at Compass Point in The Bahamas, the world famous studio used to create classic albums by Bob Marley, Shania Twain, The Rolling Stones, Wynonna Judd and U2. “There’s no ‘arranging’ of The Harters’ harmonies,” Keith says. “What they do is spontaneous. Sometimes things theoretically aren’t exciting if there’s no tension between the notes. The beauty of The Harters is just letting them do what they do instinctively.”
As the release date of The Harters approaches, Michael, Scott and Leslie continue to write, sing, play, bicker, love and dream, in harmony, as family. “They have a unique optimism and an undying commitment to singing, and they don’t make it much harder than that,” says Keith Stegall. “They just want to get out there and entertain. It’s music and it’s fun. That’s what they communicate, and that’s what I think we’ve captured.” And as the debut single ‘Jenny’ continues to rack up impressive downloads, Scott believes that their debut speaks for itself. “Our intent was never to make a record that sounded different from anything else,” he says. “The goal was to make a record that sounded like us.” For Michael, that integrity remains The Harters’ greatest gift of all. “We can’t sell-out who we are to be something we’re not,” he says. “Our sound may be different, but our roots are pure country. And being able to do what we’re doing now, we’re already living the dream.” Leslie will gladly share the secret to their success with reasoning as natural and altogether exceptional as The Harters themselves. “We’re siblings and we’re best friends, and there’s nothing hard about doing what you love,” she says. “When people ask me, ‘what kind of music do you guys sing?’ I say ‘the good kind’. And when they ask to describe our sound, I tell them that our sound is ‘home’. It really does come back to those three words: Family, love and harmony describe everything we are.”
That Nashville Sound- What brought you to music in the first place?
Leslie Harter- What brought me into music in the first place would have to be our family. There was always music being played in our house. When I turned 18 it just hit me one day that this is what I was going do. It was pretty strange cause it's been go go go, do whatever you can, ever since. There seems to be an invisible driving force.
Scott Harter- It's hard to say what brought me to music; I guess all the same things that keep me doing it every day. It's just always been in me. I was writing songs when I was like 12 years old, long before I had any goals of making something out of it, just because I enjoyed creating music.
Michael Harter- I really can't remember a time when music was not around. Our Dad, older sister, and grandpa all played and sang. Although I guess I never thought of it at the time as a way to make a living, music just came naturally. I started messing around with Dads guitar, the piano, and I even remember there being an autoharp in the house. I finally got to a place where I could play and sing entire songs and even write. I fell in love with being able to entertain people and by the age of 15 I was playing the honky tonks all over Arizona.
TNS- Describe your music, what's the mission behind the music?
LH- The best way to describe our music is family harmony. It's got a little bit of everything mixed together with our country foundation. Each song that we write is so different from the next because we write off pure truth and inspiration. Our mission in all this is to be ourselves and to be happy and as you know happiness is contagious.
SH- Our music is hard to describe, I actually don't like describing it. I like for it to speak for itself and I really don't know how to categorize it because I feel like there is such a vast group of influences in the music. I can say that it is genuinely us. We just let it happen organically. Everything that's in us is in our music, emotionally and spiritually. We don't like to put any boundaries on it. And the common thread is our vocal harmonies I guess. We really just want to write songs that are going make people sing along and feel something. If we can spread a positive message along the way then we did it all.
MH- Usually, when people ask this question, I don't have an answer- simply because there isn't one to me. Our music doesn’t really sound like anything else. It’s its own thing. There are hints of early influences like the The Eagles, The Beatles, and Keith Whitley, but I would never say we sound like one in particular. I think this is because the three of us each brings a bundle of different influences. Our mission is to have fun and hopefully make music that touches people’s lives. As long as God keeps us singing we will be.
TNS- What is it like performing as a family? Did any of you ever have aspirations of performing individually opposed as all together?
LH- Performing as a family is about as easy as it gets. We seem to have this strange ESP thing going on at all times, so it makes it real easy to follow each other no matter what happens on stage. When I was younger I stared out wanting to do my own thing cause let’s face it, who thinks it's cool to be in a family band when they are 18. Plus that thought had never even crossed my mind until my dad mentioned the idea of the 3 of us years later. I wouldn't change a thing, I love working with my brothers and I feel like the luckiest person in the world.
SH- Being in a band with your family, obviously has its rough patches, Just like doing anything with your siblings. But when it comes to performing we are better together than any of us could be alone. It's so easy because we feed off of each other and rely on each other. It gives us the ability to be spontaneous, carefree and comfortable on stage and I think people can feel that. All three of us had aspirations of performing individually prior to starting the band. I personally played in small clubs, mostly just with one guitar. I wrote a lot of songs and loved the recording process. I was still very green to all of it when we first started. But I have no doubt we all would have ended up in the music world somewhere, had we not done it together.
MH- I absolutely love performing, writing, recording, and traveling with my siblings. We are best friends and know each other better than any of us know ourselves. And we keep each other in check. Up until three years ago I never thought about singing with Scott and Les. I had a solo record deal on Broken Bow Records in 2001. Although I did manage to have the first top forty hit for the label with a song called "Hard Call to Make", something just wasn't right. I left Broken Bow shortly thereafter and moved back to Arizona where I started a synthetic grass company with my brother and brother in law. Being back home allowed me to play and sing with Scott and Leslie more and we just grew from there.
TNS- What kind of music are you listening to?
LH- I listen to all different styles of music and what I’m listening to really depends on my mood and what I’m doing at the time. When I workout; Tom Petty, Billy Joel, Cranberries, Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, Shania Twain, Cold Play, John Mayer just to name a few. In the Tub; Enya (yes that’s right I said Enya!), The Phantom of the Opera, Andrea Bocelli, Sarah Brightman ect. On the road; Shenandoah, Nickel Creek, BlackHawk, Bob Marley just to name a few, you get the idea. I’m all over the map but all in all I love music that makes me feel something!
SH- Well, as I write this right now I am literally listening to Coldplay's new album. But usually, What I'm listening to at any given period can be very different. Whatever is inspiring to me at the time. I go in waves, I will listen to the same album for a month straight and then not listen to it for another year. I am always looking for new music or old music that is just new to me. I am listening to basically all types of music, except rap. I don't listen to all that much rap. Some of my favorites just to list a few would be Coldplay, Tom Petty, Billy Joel, Bob Seger, Chris Ledoux, Ryan Adams and few new bands like the Fleet Foxes and the Perishers.
MH- What's next for you? Where do you hope to be career-wise a couple years from now?
LH- In the next couple of years I hope to have some #1's under our belt. Mostly I hope to be as happy as I am now. I can't believe that every day I get to make a living doing what I love and most importantly I know that right where you are is right where you belong.
SH- Well, we are going to release our single and hope that some people connect with the song and us as a band. Then, a couple years from now, I hope we have 3 number one hits under our belt and are out on a major tour.
MH- Next we hit the road running. Ready to do whatever it takes to get this thing off the ground. Two years from now I would love to be on our third record and touring with a major artist.
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