Those Darlins Feel at Home on the Shooting Range

Posted on Aug 19th 2009 4:00PM by Benjy Eisen
Comments

It's easy to picture the band house where Nashville's country-rock girl gang Those Darlins live when not on tour to be a cross between 'Animal House' and a scene from the 'Dukes of Hazard.' One thing is clear: 'Little House on the Prairie' it is not. "No one does the dishes; we don't have any," frontwoman Jessi Darlin tells Spinner. "We just dump everything into a big trough and scoop it out with our hands. And then, when we're thirsty, we drink from the breast of the mama wolf."

Whoa. That sounds savage. And messy. "We're all pretty messy in our own ways, and in our own time," Jessi says. "I read that Picasso's house was just full of junk everywhere. Paintings covered the floor ... but if anyone tried to move anything he would notice, because he knew exactly where everything was. I think of that story when I look at my room. And it makes me feel much better. Except, I have no idea where anything is."

There's a band room in the house, naturally, and a shooting range out back. Well, it's more like a canopy of branches from a tree that they hang things from to shoot at with a toy BB gun. "We just tie a bunch of crappy records and cans and bottles from the branches and shoot at them," Jessi explains. "Sometimes we just throw the records in the air and try to shoot them while they are up there, but they don't explode like you would hope they would."

The ladies also have an inflatable pool, hammock and other such amenities out back. Seeing as how they are only home sporadically -- they're on a near-constant tour, supporting their self-titled debut -- they really do know how to handle both meanings of the acronym R 'n' R. "I don't really know why people always wanna hear about the BB guns and stuff," says Darlin. "It's just cheap thrills! We really spend most of our time in the car port aka 'Car Hole' aka our outdoor living room. That's where a lot of beer cans and ash trays live."

Sound fabulous, Darlin.