Sometimes they make music, sometimes they make home décor. That’s the mode for Jesse and Jaci Crawford: The couple’s day job is making furniture and candles under the name Southwest Handmade, and indie rock under the name Loma Roses.
Both are having more of a presence in town, with Southwest Handmade opening a retail space in downtown Durango, and the duo of Loma Roses dropping tunes on various streaming platforms, along with airplay on local radio.
Jesse, originally from Bayfield, met Colorado Springs native Jaci in Summit County; they started writing songs, then started learning how to record those songs. That was about a dozen years ago.
“I was learning how to play guitar at the time, and Jaci was a much better singer than me, so I started contracting the singing duties to her, so I could come up with the chord progressions. We started making songs right away, the first couple evenings together really,” Jesse said. “About three years ago, I really wanted to learn how to record music and thinking it would be too expensive to go and get it professionally recorded all the time, so we learned how to record at home, and taught ourselves how to do it. Probably a year after we started recording at home, it started to sound like real music.”
Reared on classic rock like Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan and the indie rock of the last three decades like The Strokes or Arctic Monkeys, the music is a mesh of minimalistic folk and lo-fi indie-rock.
Cuts like “Heatwave” have a bratty, beachcomber punk vibe; “Molecular” with its stabbing power-chords digs into an experimental realm; and “Too Much Fun for Everyone” has a blast of cool and lazy lounge. Jaci’s vocals move from aggressive rocker to sultry and slow, giving an unpredictable element to the tunes, as the handful of songs they’ve dropped on Spotify vary from dream-pop to slacker funk to garage rock, all created with a do-it-yourself aesthetic.
“I feel like we’re all over the place sometimes,” Jesse said. “We’re just starting a song with one instrument, getting a vibe, and Jaci will take it from there and together, we’ll do the instrumentation.”
Theirs is a world of creativity. If they’re not making furniture or candles to pay the bills, they’re making songs to satisfy a musical fix; both work hand in hand with each other.
“I think there are happy breaks from one another. Music takes you on this journey, if you are singing or drumming, you can turn your brain off for a little bit, and I think that’s really helpful,” Jaci said. “So you’re not always thinking about your business, you’re thinking about something free.”
“It’s a good break from one or the other,” Jesse added. “Fundamentally, I think creating something, I kind of take a lot of the same principles to designing a chair or designing a song where you try to do the most with the least. I don’t want to take extra steps, so I definitely gravitate toward music that has minimalistic tendencies, not overdoing the details, let the elements stand on their own.”
They remain self-taught musicians through every step of the musical way, so figuring out the process, from playing a guitar to recording and mixing down instrument or vocal tracks was necessary to maintain a solid, DIY ethic.
“We being a married couple have a lot more time than we do money,” Jesse said. “And if we’re going to be doing this thing as just a project that we do together for a long period of time, let’s invest in ourselves and make it a fun thing.”
There’s also a couple of kids involved, so between maintaining a business in Southwest Handmade, and a lo-fi rock duo in Loma Roses and raising a family, they’re likely burning the candle at all ends. That’s fine.
“You can’t be too busy for the things you love,” Jaci said.
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at liggett_b@fortlewis.edu.
