INTERVIEW: Sister Sparrow says hello to new fans, goodbye to guitarist

Sister Sparrow, real name Arleigh Kincheloe, has been performing with her band, The Dirty Birds, for years, tearing up stages in New York City, New Orleans and everywhere in between. They have had some special gigs throughout their tenure, including a recent New Year’s Eve concert that was recorded and distributed as a live album (Fowl Play) and Blu-ray.

On Saturday, Nov. 12, Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds are gearing up for another memorable concert, but this one will be bittersweet.

“Well, we’ve been writing new songs out on tour this year, so [we’ll] try to play all of those and a bunch of our old favorites hopefully,” Kincheloe said recently in a phone interview. “Also it’s our guitar player’s last show with us, and he’s been with us since the very beginning. So it’s going to be a farewell party of sorts, so for those New York fans that used to see us all the way back in the days of Rockwood Music Hall and stuff, and Sasha [Brown] was with us then. It’s been eight years together, so it’ll be kind of a bittersweet but definitely a fun party. So that’s kind of our main theme this week.”

Kincheloe said she saves the band’s old set lists to ensure that when they revisit a venue or city The Dirty Birds mix the music up for their growing legion of fans. She definitely doesn’t want to perform the “same old show.”

“We haven’t played New York in quite a while now, and we have been kind of honing in a lot of different things out there this year,” she said. “So I think they’ll hear new arrangements and stuff like that, and maybe a couple new covers. We like to do something new and then also something old, especially in our hometown. So we try to make it as interesting as possible, and we do that for ourselves as well while we’re out on the road because it can get a little bit monotonous.”

Kincheloe and her brother and bandmate, Jackson Kincheloe, grew up in the Catskills of New York. She still considers this mountain range her home and place of creativity, but the opportunities in the music industry started coming fast when she made the eventual move to the Big Apple.

“The Catskills are home for sure, and I feel really creative there,” she said. “But there’s not a ton of stuff going on, on a larger scale, at least there wasn’t for me when I was there 10 years ago. Coming to New York, there’s just more places to play. There’s more musicians and then, of course, more fans. Things started to sort of blossom when we moved here.”

The real start for the soul-driven band took place at a weekly residency at the Rockwood Music Hall on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. That opportunity came in the first year of The Dirty Birds’ existence and catapulted them into a regular and steady touring act. “We did a residency, and we just were able to quickly get our sound sort of developed and get comfortable with each other and stuff before taking it out on the road a few years later,” she said.

Their sound is catchy, bombastic and difficult to categorize, and Kincheloe said she likes the many genres they touch. “I think it’s sort of a reflection of all of our different musical tastes, especially me as a songwriter,” she said. “I like a lot of different kinds of things, and I don’t want to be pigeon-holed into one thing or the other because it’s more fun that way to kind of experiment with different sounds and see what comes out. I think sometimes fans are like, what are you? What do you call yourselves? I don’t know. Lately, I say hard soul, or somebody said something really great the other day, rolling soul maybe. It’s a lot of different things all put together, and I do definitely let each of the musicians sort of bring their own flavor to the table as well.”

The bond that has formed between Kincheloe and her bandmates is strong. It needs to be because Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds are often on the road, living and working together.

“I think especially with this lineup, we’re super, super tight,” she said. “It’s been really fun to kind of develop that over the last couple of years with this specific band, and every night is super fun. We really get into it and try to make the songs sound better than the last night. I think it’s definitely family-oriented, obviously my brother being in the band, but also the vibe that I wanted to create when I started this band was very much that, a big old fun family.”

She added: “That’s what it’s like to grow up in my household, so I definitely feel very lucky that we’re able to find such great guys to be in the band and to have such a good time with. You do have to get along if you’re living in a band together. It’s not everybody that would be able to deal with that kind of intensity.”

Every year, Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds find that their demanding tour schedule gets a little easier. In 2017, they will probably choose a lighter touring schedule, no doubt a reflection of their well-earned popularity. But the touring will never stop. For an outfit like The Dirty Birds, that’s where the musical opportunities (and money) can be found.

“Not to be blunt, but that’s kind of where the money is, at least from where we’re sitting,” Kincheloe said. “So to be able to continue the band’s progression, you need fuel for the fire. A lot of time we’re busting our ass out there both for the betterment of the band and the music, and to gain more friends, but also to keep the engine going and to keep the mouths fed. It’s a little bit of everything.”

The band’s latest release is Fowl Play, their first live album. It comes after four well-received original albums. The choice to record their stage performance was a bit of serendipitidy. They were scheduled to play a New Year’s Eve at Daryl Hall’s Upstate New York venue in Pawling, New York. When that fell through — not many details were given on why — the band scrambled to find a venue to put on a lucrative holiday show.

“That’s something that is kind of a big deal for a band,” Kincheloe said. “You kind of need to play on New Year’s Eve. We sort of scrambled together with the help of our team, and our management actually had a great idea to record the night and make it a really special night because we were trying to do it so quickly. We thought, how could we make this the biggest night ever for Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds. And we figured that was the way to do it, so we quickly got the whole direction team in order. And it turned out to be this enormous night for us. It was really great to be able to capture that on the record, and now we have a Blu-ray of the whole night. We do a six-camera shoot, and we have that selling at our shows as well. So that’s kind of another new milestone for us. We’ve never put out a concert DVD before, so this is a first. It’s really exciting, and definitely I’m very proud of it.”

The years of success, and now the fond farewell to the band’s guitarist, allow Kincheloe to be reflective of how far Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds have come. She can see the changes in subtle ways. At first, fans would call her Sister Sparrow, and now more of them call her by her real name.

There’s a good story behind the Sister Sparrow moniker as well.

“The name originated in a hotel room with my sister, and my brother and myself,” she said. “We were on a trip from New York to L.A., moving my sister out there. I started calling her Mama Quail because the name of the hotel was the Desert Quail Inn. We were in Arizona, so she was Mama Quail. She said I was too tiny to be a Mama, so I had to be Sister something. So Sister Sparrow came out of that night. It was pretty fitting.”

The Dirty Birds’ name came from an experience her brother had at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan.

“My brother was trying to take a bus from Port Authority up to the Catskills, and he had been kind of up late drinking and stuff with his friends,” she said. “He was trying to tell the woman in Port Authority that they had a bird infestation. They had a pigeon problem, but all he could do was say in his inebriated state, ‘Dirty birds, those dirty birds.’ When he came back and told us that story, I thought it was so embarrassing and hilarious that it just sort of clicked.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds will perform at New York City’s Irving Plaza Saturday, Nov. 12. Click here for more information.