Folk duo We Mavericks – aka Vic and Linds – are bringing their unique brand of alt-country, contemp-folk, acoustic-pop, all heart and sensational talent to a live performance at the Tomerong Hall on Saturday 29 November, on tour for their new album, Heart of Silver. We asked them what we can expect on the night.
“This is our first time that we’re playing as a four-piece, and we are really excited about it – I can’t wait, it blows our socks off,” says Lindsay Martin, one-half of the folk duo, We Mavericks with Victoria Vigenser.
Lindsay is talking about the cello-playing duo of Rachel Johnston and Trent Arkleysmith, who they met at the inaugural Bundanoon Folk Festival in 2023 and who played on their second studio album and are on tour with them – currently in NZ then heading south through NSW on the way to Melbourne.
Victoria adds: “We get super stoked when we have a rehearsal or do a performance and all four of us go, whooo, which is so nice!”
Then Lindsay adds: “And they can sing! We’re singing four-part harmonies on some of the songs and it’s a little delish, we get goose bumps.”
The enthusiasm for their new-found cellists is all down to chemistry, something that Vic and Linds had from the moment they first met at a folk festival in New Zealand (where Vic is originally from) and that they are now re-living in their new collaboration with Rachel and Trent.
“When we met each other, we started playing together, performing together, it was the best musical thing we’d ever done in our lives,” says Vic of her partnership with Lindsay. “And Rachel and Trent also came together like that, and when we met at the Bundanoon Folk Festival it felt like that all over again.”
CHEMISTRY
Vic and Linds have a natural dynamic between them that radiates from their performances and is no less zingy when we catch up on zoom to talk about this tour and the new album, Heart of Silver. The genuine connection is part of what makes their music so special.
Victoria is a natural storyteller, which shines through in the lyrics of this new album. “I really like words and I like the way they can make sense of emotions,” she explains of her songwriting. “I’ve met a lot of people, myself included, who aren’t necessarily very good at articulating emotions as they feel them. And that’s where songwriting is really great, being able to put words around things. Because emotions are so complicated so trying to find a metaphor that can maybe be taken in several different ways is great because you’re not having to pin down the way you are experiencing or feeling something.”
Lindsay, she says, has a natural producer and arranger head, “when it comes to putting the songs together, structuring them and making them move, that’s when we get together, Lindsay’s got all the little hooks that can make you feel things that words can’t. Then it all comes together and becomes its own thing, its own entity as a song.”
HEART
Strings have voices, too, and Lindsay on the violin is just as lyrical as the words. “The violin is very vocal,” Vic says, and Lindsay adds, “Yes, I’m the emotional side of it.” Vic snickers, “You’re not wrong. He’s the emotional one.” “Yeah,” he retorts, “you’re just a cardboard cutout.” This is typical of their patter which sometimes emerges on stage, as Lindsay says, to break down the fourth wall.
The strings really do add heart to this album, and Lindsay explains that one of the greatest things about working with Rachel and Trent was they work in the same ways.
“We had an idea on the song. Hold Me, that it needed an outro, so let’s do a string section, let’s go a bit sick. It was just an idea, and then we met Rachel and Trent at Bundanoon and I said, just hook around these chords. And because they can, they just did.”
They all laid down some string tracks and what ended up coming together was not just the Outro but a whole new collaboration.
“Once you set that precedent, you can’t introduce voicing on an album and not have it appear somewhere else, it sticks out too much. So we gave them a couple of others we thought would fit.” Lindsay says the couple put themselves, their musicality into the songs, just as he and Vic do, which is perfect. “We want them to be part of it, to have some ownership of it.”
The title track really captures the essence of the album, described in the liner notes as a “smooth-sounding journey across rough emotional ground”. Vic’s lyrical skills are on full display across the songs. She says, “Our main goal with our music is to share a bit of weirdness with people, to make them feel a little bit less alone about their own weirdness.”
TOURING
Victoria and Lindsay have been on a whirlwind world tour over the past year and bit, with two trips to the UK as well as Germany, Austria and Switzerland, playing a mix of their new album and previous album and some back catalogue work too.
“It was a big stint,” Lindsay says of the second trip which was over two months, and Vic says, “Seven festivals and lots of other shows.”
The international interest in their music makes their lives as full-time musicians “sustainable” they say, and touring was always part of their plan.
In the UK, they were invited to play additional festivals and concerts as they travelled around and people became enamoured with their music. One festival they added to their itinerary on the spur of the moment involved driving across the UK. Vic says, “it took us eight and a half hours but we were like, ah, we live in Australia, it’s fine!”
Lindsay says, “We were shocked a little bit, at how well we were received. We’d come off stage, in a huge marquee, and there’d be people standing and applauding, this little duo.”
Vic adds: “It’s a very special thing in the UK particularly, to receive a standing ovation, it feels a bit wanky to say it but it was really amazing.”
HUMBLE TROUBADORS
Both Vic and Linds are very humble, but they deserve standing ovations. They put their whole selves into their music and their performances, and audiences across Australia are also feeling it. The pair talk about recent trips into regional Australia where whole communities packed local halls to hear them play. They both say it’s a privilege but that really goes both ways.
Three sold-out shows on the NSW north coast preceded their current quick trip to NZ, and Vic says, “without sounding all weird and spiritual, it was a really good connection, not just between us, but our music was a conduit for their connection too, which is really cool.”
They talk about wall-to-wall crowds in the community halls of country towns where people young and old have gathered for these concerts, as Linds says, “people are really on board, they want you to take them somewhere carry them from the day to day just a little bit”.
STORYTELLING
Vic says she has realised how important the storytelling is, through music. “It’s like tapping into … like sharing in each other’s strangeness and feeling a little bit less alone because of that”.
Linds adds: “It’s not contrived. We play the music because we love it. We tell the story because it’s true and then we think, oh, people really resonated with that.”
In the five years that We Mavericks have been performing, they have resonated with thousands of people across the globe. They already have plenty of bookings for next year and even some for 2027 plus another album is definitely starting to coalesce even as they tour Heart of Silver.
LIVING THE DREAM
Alongside the standing ovations, a lot of touring involved eating sardines in carparks. Lindsay recounts: “We had driven six and a half hours and we got to a carpark in this little village in England, there was nothing open. So we go into the little supermarket to the pre-made stuff…”
Vic adds, “there was one sandwich left and some weird little chicken bites that looked suspicious.”
Linds: “So we had those, and we’re on the car and a guy drives in and says, oh, on tour. And we just laughed and went, yeah.”
Vic: “Sometimes its canapes at an album launch and sometimes its sardines in a carpark.”
Both: “Living the dream.”
TICKETS ON SALE NOW
See We Mavericks live at the Tomerong Hall on Saturday 29 November, tickets are $30/$10 and doors open 6.30pm. Also appearing at the Bundanoon Folk Festival 21-23 November and Robertson Public House 28 November.
