Watching the way the Civil Wars' John Paul White and Joy Williams talk together is almost as pleasing as listening to them play. We're in Williams's enormous sun-drenched kitchen in Nashville, she pouring tea while he grips an enormous coffee. Shebeams, he broods. He's soft-spoken,still and implacable. She's proneto big bursts of hearty laughter, usually in response to his deadpannedretorts. And yet these two almost comically different souls seem to have some kind of quiet, deeply felt understanding; I'm not surprised they get mistaken for a married couple.
Their stripped-back duets are simple – hushed and intense Americana full of tales of heartache and hard times – but it's the interplay and rise and fall of their two voices that makes them extraordinary.
The two met three years ago at a camp for songwriters, both disillusioned with the business and despondent about ever making careers of their own. They were paired up, put in a room together to write and what happened next made the hairs on both of their necks stand on end.
"As soon as we started to sing together it was like we'd been doing it for generations," says White with his long southern vowels. "Like our parents had been doing it and their parents had, like a brother-sister thing, from the womb to where there was this subconscious thing that meant we didn't have to say anything."
Williams picks up the story: "I remember going back to my husband that day and saying, 'I just met this guy!' Which is not," she laughs, "the normal way of speaking to your husband!"
While Williams grew up on the west coast, raised on pop and jazz, White, "down on the Alabama-Tennessee line", is steeped in blues and country. They come from pretty divergent places musically, then, I prompt.
"Well, we come from very divergent places, period," says White. A big laugh from Williams: "In every way!"
"I feel like we pull from each other's world so it becomes something actually larger than the two of us," says White. "Every time we sit down it starts flowing, immediately. And that's pretty uncommon."
Williams enthuses that "it creates this very… very atmospheric place to create within that feels safe and feels totally free and... I just can't... " She gives up, grinning and bashful. "You've caught us in a very good mood today."
That might have something to do with just having won two Grammys. Two weeks after the US release of their debut album, Barton Hollow, the pair were awarded best country duo/group performance (for the album's title track) and best folk album.
"It's just like a strange little acid flashback I'm having," says White, recalling the ceremony. "You spend your entire life dreaming of those sorts of things, watching those shows as you grow up and it happens and it's pretty overwhelming. I went back home and it's just, you know: take out the trash, clean out the toilet... honestly, I have to look back at pictures to make sure it actually happened."
For her part, Williams remembers climbing the steps to the stage and thinking: "I'm going to die. I'm goingtofaint, right here. I'm going to fall in these four-inch heels that I neverwear and I'm going to die. And then the second stair was I remembered a conversation I'd had backstage with Adele… "
White, poker-faced, adds: "She's a singer."
Civil Wars supported Adele on tour after she said that "they are the best live band I have ever seen". They also have an effusive fan and friend in Taylor Swift.
When Williams talks about being backstage at the Grammys and seeing Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt "and Chris Martin, just chasing after his children...", White interjects: "I didn't meet any of those people; I think it's for the best. I just assume the gods stay up on the pedestal and don't speak to the peasants."
But Williams relayed back to him "the sweet things they had to say".
What kind of things?
"They... they... said they were fans." He stresses the word, incredulous. "And that kind of freaks me out."
While White's hands remain locked around his cup, Williams touches the curve of her belly; she and her husband, Nate, who is also the band's manager, are expecting their first child in June. The baby kicked throughout the Grammys: "That will always remain a really sweet memory to me: sharing the stage with John Paul and my husband and my baby. It's been," she adds, "a sweet, sweet season."
And it's been a long time coming for both of them. "It's very cliched to say follow your heart," says White. "We'd heard it all our lives, but you have to get to a place where you just don't care any more about anything but wellbeing. You have to have a little bit of heartache and hit some walls."
Williams gives the slow nod of an old timer: "We hit plenty of walls before meeting each other."
Her recording career began when she was just 17 with the first of three albums on the Christian music label Reunion Records. I tell her how I find it hard to square the girl-next-door blonde of those album covers with the woman in front of me.
She nods and laughs, sheepishly. "Literally and figuratively, I went back to my roots – I am a natural brunette, let the record show! It seems like an entirely different era of my life. It's as if my high school year book is up for everybody to see at any point in time. I started so young, I had no idea who I really was or who I wanted to become."
But after she and White paired up, things moved fast. In 2009, their second ever show was released as a free album, Live at Eddie's Attic, and they received a huge boost after their "Poison & Wine" was played on the TV show Grey's Anatomy. Last October's Jools Holland appearance was another key moment: minutes after they performed their stirring, bluesy duet "Barton Hollow", the phrase "TheCivilWars" was trending on Twitter.
I ask them what they think it is about them that's struck such a chord. White doesn't miss a beat.
"Me," he says.
Williams laughs. "And his humility."
"I would like to think," adds White, "that people believe that we truly, truly love what we do and what we sing every single day. If I see somebody just mailing it in, it's obvious. We all know there's a lot of people out there doing that and I think people are sick of it, honestly. My dad says – and he's not a music guy at all, but he's an old-school country fan – he says people always gravitate back toward that kind of music when times are tough... people gravitate away from sights and move more towards the sounds."
And Williams, who's been watching him intently, adds: "There's an ebb and flow to the active listening of each other... it's a perpetual conversation."
I leave them talking.
