Singled Out: The Rough & Tumble “The Hardest Part”

September 6, 2019 Brian Carroll

With a name like The Rough & Tumble you may picture a raucous and rollicking band with a rootsy edge and the duo of Mallory Graham and Scott Tyler can certainly be those things…and they do it very well…but “The Hardest Part” echoes feelings of longing balanced with brightness and a light guiding you to the future. Graham’s voice entering with a drifting beauty, a simple introduction that eventually builds like the towering mountain that the song was written for and while the duo may have unsuccessfully summited that hill they were looking to climb straight up, they sure as hell are peaking high and mighty in this music and songwriting game.

Who: The Rough & Tumble

From: The road…but also East Nashville, TN / Black Mountain, NC

Song: ‘The Hardest Part’

Latest Record: Howling Back at the Wounded Dog (out TODAY)

What About It: “We wrote “The Hardest Part” up in Vermont after we unsuccessfully tried to hike Mt. Ascutney. We were hoping for a nice, peaceful walk in some beautiful Vermont hills with our dog and what we got was a strenuous hike straight up a mountain. We’ve since gone back and hiked it all the way to the peak, but on that first attempt we just didn’t have the will to finish, as every time that the hardest part seemed to be over, we found that there was the next hardest part just up the mountain a little further. It didn’t help that we had started arguing part way through the hike and that turning around didn’t magically solve our problems. And neither did the forty minute drive back to our camper. And when we found ourselves still arguing at seven o’clock that night, it seemed that writing ourselves out of an argument might be the only way forward. Now, we don’t always recommend writing a song mid-fight, usually an apology or a hug is the right move, but this time we were able to get a lot off of our chests with some paper and a pen. And what we uncovered was a song that spoke more to the determination we had to stay together than to the differences that threatened to break us apart. “The hardest part is over, until the next hardest part,” for us means that we want to keep going and want to keep climbing that mountain, whatever it may be. In our shows, we sing it with a lot of joy and have found it’s morphed with us through current events, personal issues and the struggle of being an independent musician in 2019.

We recorded the song with Dave Coleman of Nashville based roots trio, The Cole Men, in his studio in Nashville. It’s just the three of us- Dave was on drums, bass and electric guitar, Scott and Mallory on the rest- and to us it feels very personal and intimate in the way it was recorded, the layers of sound, and that all adds to the urgency of the song- the urgency of letting the person you love know exactly where you are. At it’s core, it’s a folk song, with the repeatable melody and the simple chords, but we tried to allow the song’s darker, hard worn themes to emerge through the use of scraping the strings of the piano, the drone of Mallory’s accordion and the chiming, melancholy electric guitar. It’s a song about looking back and seeing how far you’ve come, but even more so, it’s about looking forward to how far you have to go.”