Heartdrunk in Love

Aaron and Judy Webb are married to music...and to each other.

Local country-folk-punk rock lovebirds Hey Judy paid us a visit this fall to fill our courtyard with sweet sounds and to talk with us about being a rock and roll couple and the past, present, and future of their music.

The Tulsa Voice: How did Hey Judy get its start?

Aaron Webb: You wanna take that one, Judy?

Judy Webb: Was it before we got married or after we got married?

AW: I think it was actually after we got married.

JW: After we got married, I used to do a lot of contract computer design work at night, so Aaron was bored, so he would just start playing his guitar at night, playing songs from a band he used to have in Ohio, and I just started singing harmonies for fun while I was working, and he’s like, “I didn’t know you could sing!” So we started playing together just in our living room never expecting to go anywhere, just for fun, and then we were like, “You know, it might be kinda fun to play out live.” And then we hooked up with this guy [drummer Erol Coulter]…

AW: Straight up HOOKED UP.

JW: HOOKED UP. And so that’s basically how it started.

AW: Judy got her singing chops in the church choir when she was growing up.

JW: And I don’t like to just stand there when I sing, so that’s why I decided to learn how to play the bass. So I would have something to do with my hands.

TTV: That’s awesome. What’s it like to be a married couple who front a rock band?

JW: Well, we work together, live together, obviously, we carpool together, and we band together! But we never fight, so it works out. It’s kinda awesome.

AW: We spend all our time together.

JW: We love it.

AW: Yup. It works out.

TTV: What were some of your early musical influences?

AW: I’m a big Chuck Berry fan, and I like a lot of 60s girl groups. Judy really loves Willie Nelson. Erol, I’m not trying to answer for him…

Erol Coulter: Oh, you can, that’s fine.

AW: I know he loves Frank Zappa, and…

EC: Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, Jim Croce.

AW: Freddie Mercury.

EC: Freddie Mercury, definitely. Queen.

JW: I like Tori Amos, Nick Drake, Iron and Wine’s early years. That’s my style.

TTV: Tell us about “The Trouble with Lycanthropy,” a song about a bouncer and a werewolf, from your album What. Where did that song come from?

JW: His crazy mind!

AW: [Laughs] Yeah. Well part of it is kind of a rip-off from this band called Centro-Matic, out of Denton, TX. They’re actually on their farewell tour right now. They had this song called “Rock and Roll Eyes”, and I think their line was “Kids in the skies with your rock and roll eyes,” and I just basically ripped that line right off. [In Webb's line, the kids are in disguise.]

JW: Nice.

AW: So I started doing my own chord progression with it and sort of built a song around it. I don’t know how the werewolf, lycanthropy thing wound up in there. It was one of those songs that came from the universal subconscious or something, you know?

TTV: Speaking of the universal subconscious, where does the inspiration to write a song generally come from for you?

AW: I don’t know. I’ve been writing poetry since I was, I don’t know, in fourth grade or something. Really bad poetry. A lot of really perverse and dirty limericks and things like that.

JW: Which I hear all the time. [Laughs]

AW: [Laughs] Yeah. And that’s where a lot of it starts, but once I learned to play guitar, sometimes it’ll just start with a chord progression that I like. I wouldn’t even call it a riff because I’m not really that good of a guitarist. But sometimes I’ll hear a melody amongst two or three chords and then something will come into my head, you know?

JW: Once I left the house for 45 minutes and I came back and he had written two new love songs for me.

AW: Because you were gone so long!

JW: I know! [Laughs]

AW: We never spend that much time apart.

JW: I was like, “Two new songs?! Wow!”

TTV: Earlier this year you released a split EP with The Fabulous Minx. How did that come about?

JW: They asked us. And we said, “OK.”

AW: We had played with them a few times before, and we always felt like our styles meshed pretty well. They’ve kinda got that rockabilly, garage thing going on, and we’ve got a little bit of that. I guess we’re probably a little more country then they are, but it just seemed to be a good fit.

JW: They recorded it through their label, Midnight Creeper Records.

TTV: What are you listening to these days?

JW: We listen to a lot of local music. We’re totally about local music.

AW: Judy and I are all about local music. Especially the bands we play with like Cucumber and the Suntans, The Daddyo’s, Fabulous Minx, Dirty Creek Bandits…

JW: Johnny Badseed and the Rotten Apples.

AW: We hardly listen to anything else. I do listen to college radio when I’m driving around in the work van.

JW: RSU.

AW: Yeah we listen to RSU quite a bit. But they actually play a lot of local music too. That’s mostly what we’re doing right now.

TTV: You’ve begun work on your next record. What can you tell us about it so far?

AW: [Sighs]

JW: It’s awesome.

AW: [Laughs] It’s probably a little more punk rock than our last one. We’re gonna get a few other local musicians in on it too. We want to get Steve Andrest from Dirty Creek Bandits to play his mandolin on a couple of things. There will be some pretty hard rockin’ stuff and then there will also be some more county-fied kinda folky soundin’ stuff. Something for everyone.