About two and a half years ago I was buried in one of my late-night Internet music video trolling sessions, when I stumbled across a video for a song called “Walking On a Wire”, by a band called The Imaginaries. Both the song and the video were terrific, sparking me to look for more from this husband-and-wife duo, who hadn’t been on my radar up to that point.
The next video I found was for a song called “Revival”. It absolutely blew me away. Incredible songwriting. Incredible performance. And a terrific video that was more of a short film than a traditional music video.
Both of these songs were from the debut, self-titled album by The Imaginaries, which had been released two years earlier, in March of 2021.
The Imaginaries are Maggie McClure (piano, keys, vocals) and Shane Henry (guitar, vocals). The Americana/roots/folk/rock duo first met in 2004, when Maggie opened a show for Shane in their home state of Oklahoma. At the time, both were early in their respective solo careers. They began working in support of each other’s solo projects, fell in love, and eventually married in 2011. Then, in a scenario that can only be described as fate (something that has happened for them more than once), they blended their individual styles into something that seemed to have been meant to be.
Poised for the release of their sophomore album (Fever, which drops on August 22), Maggie and Shane are heading out on the road for a tour that will keep them busy into November. On Tuesday, September 2, they’ll be doing a very special performance at Stone Cottage Studios in Boulder. In advance of that show, I sat down with them to talk about the evolution of their solo projects into The Imaginaries, the kismet-like way they came up with their band name (and logo), the passion behind their music videos, and the new record.
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Maggie and Shane are in the middle of a scheduled “media day.” My interview with them is the third so far today, and they have yet another after mine. As Maggie joined the call via Zoom, Shane was off camera refueling with another cup of coffee. We pick up the conversation as Shane joins us…
Rick: So Shane, Maggie and I were talking before you joined us about the fact that you get asked the same questions all the time… that because every interviewer is writing for a different audience, it’s kind of necessary to go over a lot of the same ground over and over again. So if you don’t mind indulging me, I do need to ask you guys to walk us through the now legendary story of how you met, back when Maggie opened up for one of your gigs.
Shane: Sure. So I started playing when I was fifteen and started my first blues band. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma where there were no musicians, so I started going outside to try to find them. I started going to the Oklahoma City blues jams, and I met a keyboard player named Jim Robinson. Jim recorded on my first album when I was sixteen, and he played with me and my band until I was eighteen.
I graduated high school early, and when I turned eighteen, I signed with a management company in Minneapolis called Blue Sky Artist Management. I was doing blues rock music at the time, and they got me opening for B.B. King. They got so many crazy, amazing opportunities for me as a young musician. I lived in Minneapolis from the time I was eighteen until close to twenty-one and then I moved back to Oklahoma. When I moved back, I started working with a lot of the same band members again. One of the musicians I called was my first keyboard player, Jim Robinson. I had a gig coming up at this place called the Red Dirt Cafe, and we’re at a rehearsal, getting ready for the gig, and Jim said, hey, there’s this girl I’ve been teaching piano lessons to. I’m actually dating her mom. She’s really good, and she’s only played like Borders Books and, you know, Hastings, and I think some coffee shops. Would it be okay if she opened the show? And I said, yeah, it’s fine, you know.
Maggie was sixteen or seventeen, at the time. I was twenty… pretty big difference in our ages then. But we met, and became friends, and then I played guitar and helped her on her first couple of records. And that’s how we connected… over music.
Maggie: Yeah, and over the years, I would sing backgrounds with Shane, then I would start playing keys and backing him up on his shows. Then we got a college booking agent, and we were driving all over the country playing Maggie McClure shows and Shane Henry shows, backing each other up as a duo. And so we really developed, you know, a strong chemistry.
Shane: When you play over 10,000 hours with somebody, and at this point I know we’ve played that many hours together, there’s no way we haven’t (developed that chemistry). You kind of get to the point where it’s like you know where somebody’s going. I mean, there’s a kind of connection there. It’s like when a tight band has been playing for a long time, you can feel where people are going and that’s just kind of how we got after doing this forever.
Maggie: And so, I would release a solo record, and then he would, and then I would, and then he would, and people would always ask, can you guys do something together?
Shane: Yeah, they would come out to a show, and I was playing my record with acoustic guitar, and Maggie was backing me up singing, and they’d be, where’s that album? (Laughing) Well, we don’t have the unplugged version yet.
But fast forward, we’re living in LA, and it’s 2017 or maybe 2018. We’re living in a house we’re renting in Glendale, and the house has black mold. So we have to move out, right? Maggie’s been getting sick for six months with sinus infections and whatnot. So we go to live with our friend Devin Powers. He actually owned a house next to the one he lived in in Thousand Oaks, which had been converted into a recording studio.
So we’re hanging out there, trying to figure out what our living situation is going to be. I’m finishing up a new solo album, and we’re hanging out with our friend Devin. And Devin says that his good buddy John Cuniberti is starting this YouTube program called The OneMic Series. And he’s gonna go to all the legendary studios, like Electric Ladyland and Sun and Muscle Shoals and all these cool places. And he’s gonna record bands around one microphone. And he asks us to send him a couple of our songs, because he thinks John will really dig what we’re doing. And so we did.
Maggie: A couple of my songs, a couple of his.
Shane: So two, three weeks go by, and he (John Cuniberti) calls and says, I listened to your stuff and really like what I heard, but I’ve already booked up the entire series. Could you guys maybe come down to Muscle Shoals and just do a couple of songs together? And that was literally the start of the band. I mean, it was so obvious that we should have gone this way before somebody told us to, or given us this…
Maggie: … opportunity…
Shane: … this catalyst to come together. About that time, we were both at the end of album cycles. We had written some stuff that felt kind of fresh and new, and we were up for a new adventure, you know. And so we went down there, and we were very surprised at how well it all went down. It was magical. It was like that feeling you get when you learn a song for the first time, when you’re a brand-new musician or guitar player, and you pick up a guitar and you learn a song that you love, and you can sing and play it at the same time. It’s like… this incredible feeling. It was like that. Everything fell into place. It was so effortless and easy to create and when we came home, we were like, okay, we’re gonna write a record. And we did, and we went back maybe ten months later, toward the end of 2018 or early 2019, and we recorded our first album.
Rick: So there’s this other legendary story about how you came up with the name The Imaginaries. Apparently, it was one of those cosmic revelation type of things that came to you, Shane, in a dream. Did that come to you before or after you did the OneMic Series?
Maggie: No, it was after. We hadn’t figured it (the name) out yet.
Shane: That (the OneMic Series appearance) was in April of 2018, and he (John Cuniberti) decided to release those videos later in the fall.
Maggie: So we had to figure out our name for those (videos).
Shane: We were Shane and Maggie. I was teasing people… we were a hair band, regardless. We were Shaggy (points to Maggie), or Mane (point to himself), or whatever. We couldn’t come up with anything. Over here in our studio, we have a little whiteboard, and that’s the board we started sketching out band names on. Like, The Dream Catchers, you know. We had all these kind of fun names we were coming up with, but they were all taken… there were already bands out there that had them. And it was honestly coming down to the wire. And it’s so funny because our personalities are so different. Maggie’s very on point. Like, everything’s planned. We’ve got to do this. Things have got to happen pronto. And I’m a little bit more like, loose about stuff, you know. And it’s okay, it works, it fits well. But we had this serious conversation about it, because I wasn’t getting down to the nitty gritty or putting enough attention into figuring out the band name, I think. And one night she cornered me in bed. She was like, okay, we’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got two days. Otherwise we’re going to be Shane and Maggie forever. We’re going to be known as this bluegrass band, Shane and Maggie and the Prairie Dogs, or whatever.
And I said, we’ll come up with something, you know? It’ll come. And I don’t know, I think that maybe when you go to sleep with something really strong on your mind like that, maybe something divine happens. Now, I never have vivid dreams. Maggie, she’s the vivid dreamer, and she talks a lot in her sleep. A lot of times in her sleep, you know, she’s networking. She’s meeting an A&R guy. She’s booking a gig. I mean, this girl never stops working. She’s in a songwriting session, in a dream. You never know what she’s doing. But I had the most vivid dream of my life. We’re playing at a festival, huge festival. We’re on the side of the stage, and our band that plays with us in Oklahoma is all sitting there, huddled up, and we’re about to take the stage. I mean, it looks like we’re playing Red Rocks or something. Just seeing all the people out there, it’s what every musician dreams of… just a sea of people out there.
Anyway, we’re about to take the stage, and this announcer comes out, and he says, I want to tell you, we’ve got a really special band playing tonight. Please welcome to the stage, The Imaginaries. And we walk out on stage and start rocking. And I look back and there’s our banner behind us.
Rick: You’ve got the logo and everything?
Shane: It looks a lot like that in my dream. I kind of described it to our graphic designers, and then they drew it all out. But, I mean, it’s pretty much like it looked in the dream.
Rick: That’s awesome. What are you gonna do, man? I mean, how do you explain something like that?
Shane: I don’t know. To me, it just had to be what we were, what the band was supposed to be called. I mean, I could have never landed on that, I don’t think if I were trying. It just happened.
Rick: That’s a really cool story. You know, when you mentioned how you guys were still working on your solo projects, it occurred to me that I should tell you about my old iPod. If I could find it, I would show you that I have several tunes loaded to it from an album called Light in the Dark, released in 2017 by some blues rock guitar guy. (This was Shane’s last album release as a solo artist.) So there you go… we go way back, brother.
Shane: That’s awesome. I love that. You know, it’s funny because I was very proud of the songs on that record. I felt like they were some of the best songs I had ever written. But I was so disappointed, because it felt like the album fell on deaf ears, you know what I mean? But I guess you never know if it’s actually reaching people.
Maggie: And obviously, it did.
Shane: It did… it really did.
Rick: Well, clearly it did for me. I mean, I spend countless hours just out trolling, looking for new music. That’s how I found you guys. It was in 2023 in the middle of one of my multi-hour sessions where I’m looking for new music, and I came across this video for a song called “Walking On a Wire” (from The Imaginaries 2021 debut album). So I watched it, and it was amazing. First of all, the song was awesome. But the video was equally awesome. It was like a little movie. So I started looking for more stuff from you, and I found the video for “Revival” (also from that debut album). And it was even better… it had this whole Bonnie and Clyde thing going on.
So right away it was obvious to me that you guys had something special going on. The music is great, and the videos are just amazing. The connection between them is incredible.
Maggie: Thank you so much. You know, we are very visual people, and when we’re writing songs and we’re recording them, we’re dreaming up what the music video is going to look like. That’s a big part of what we do, and it’s really cool when we get to bring those visions to life. “Walking On a Wire” was such a cool shoot. We filmed in the Little Sahara Desert here in Oklahoma, and it just fit the song so well. And “Revival,” that was such a fun music video to do.
We’ve created six new music videos for the new album, and five of them are currently out. So, we’re really excited about all of those. We’re actually having a big watch party at a local movie theater in August, which is going to be really cool to see them all on the big screen. We just love creating music videos to go with our songs, so we really appreciate you saying that.
Rick: So to make the most of the time we have left, let’s jump to the new record, shall we? It’s called Fever, and it’s set to drop on August 22. I was fortunate enough to get an advanced copy of it last week, and I’ve listened to it all the way through, several times. All I can say is bravo. You guys nailed it. It’s simply fantastic, so congratulations on that.
However, I also have to say… four and a half years? (That’s the time between the release of their first and second albums. Both Shane and Maggie immediately know what I’m talking about.)
Shane: I know, right?
Rick: That’s a really long time between releases. Now, I know you guys stay amazingly busy, and have a lot going on. You’ve done a ton of sync placements, and you had the A Cowgirl’s Song movie, and you’ve put out a number of singles. But that’s still a long time. Did it seem that way to you? I mean, was there a point during that stretch where in the middle of the night Maggie was poking you, Shane, and saying, look, man, we have got to get a new record out?
Shane: Pretty much. I mean, it’s so hard for musicians to make a living at this, and so we’re doing other things so we can keep coming back to what we really love. I started an Airbnb business. So I’m renovating houses and having to do other things that I never thought in a million years I’d be doing. But I’m grateful that I get to do that. I’m grateful that it provides for us to be able to chase this. We’re not signed (to a recording contract). We don’t have anybody. It’s just two of us against the world, and it takes a lot of money to do this. We don’t talk about that often, but it costs a lot of money to make a project, to do it right, to hire a team of people and to put it out into the world and set it up in the best way for it to be successful.
We could have released this project a year ago. Everything was done. I mean, we released the single with Vince Gill last summer. The album could have come out right after that, but we have been working with a distributor, Symphonic out of Nashville, and they wanted us to do this waterfall of releasing a single every eight weeks. And that way we could keep a fan base engaged. We could keep people hungry for more rather than just putting it all out there. But I will say, we’re locked and loaded on another set of songs and ready to go. You know how it is, I mean, by the time it finally gets to the point of releasing it, you have to sort of get away from the music for a little bit, because you’ve heard it a million times. We just recently listened to the record because we got our vinyl test pressings, and that was the first time we’ve sat back and listened to it in a while, and we felt very proud of the project and very excited.
Maggie: Yeah, and I think it is good for people to know that that’s the reason… that it costs a lot of money to do this, and if people aren’t supporting the band by buying tickets to shows and buying the album it’s really hard for us to keep doing it.
Shane: I would love our next project to come out in less than 24 months, if possible. That would be the ideal goal.
Rick: Well, I’ll say this… the plan to release singles in that waterfall manner did exactly what your distributor wanted it to do. For people like me, who might have been wondering where you guys had gotten off to, when the singles started coming out, it indicated that something must be coming. And when those singles included collaborations with artists like Vince Gill and Ariel Posen and Joe Bonamassa, I thought, not only is something coming, but something BIG is coming.
We could probably talk about every song on the new record, and I would love to do that, but since we’re running short on time, I want to focus on one in particular. And it’s probably not one you might immediately think of.
I listened to “Constant” when it dropped last week, and my initial reaction was that it was going to be the most classically emotive song on the album. It’s just beautiful, and it has so much meaning to it. But then I listened to the whole record, and when I heard “Here For You”… I’ve got to tell you. I’ve listened to the album three times now, and every time that song starts playing, I start getting choked up. It’s just so powerful.
Shane: Wow, that’s great. That song has been with me for a long time… I would say, over five years. I wrote it when I could see that Maggie was going through this sort of rough patch. (At this point Shane turns and talks directly to Maggie.) And you can be really hard on yourself, especially when you feel like something’s not going right, or a door’s not opening that you want to open. And I sat down, and I wrote it, but I never really thought the chorus was where it needed to be. You know what I mean? And I brought it to you, and you liked it, and we worked on it, and we thought we had it done.
Maggie: Yeah, I loved it. We went to Santa Fe for a couple days, to get out of the summer heat, and we played with it a little bit while we were there.
Shane: And then I played it for one of my songwriting mentors, and I said, man, something’s just not right with this chorus. Can you help me figure out what it is? And it just needed a few chord changes… a few different things. He helped us put that bridge in there, which I feel is so cool and such an important part of that song. “Find comfort knowing you’re not alone.” I mean, that brought the whole song together.
Maggie: And at first, we were calling it “Meaning In It All,” and that was the hook. But then we reworked it with Jeff, and he was like, the point isn’t, meaning in it all. It’s, I’m here for you. “Here For You.” He really helped us shape that.
Shane: And I love that it’s that song that caught your ear. And I wonder, now I’m thinking about the songs we left off the record. We cut fifteen tunes in Muscle Shoals, and we decided to narrow it down to twelve. So there’s three that are left over, and those three could have been like brother/sister songs to “Here For You.” You’ll hear them eventually.
Maggie: Yeah, they’re bonus tracks on the vinyl. There’s a QR code, so it’s a little nugget for people who buy the vinyl. And then we’ll also release them as singles later on.
Rick: That’s awesome… even more to look forward to.
So wrapping things up, let’s talk briefly about your upcoming show in Boulder. It’s going to be at Stone Cottage Studios, and people need to know that this isn’t a conventional concert venue. It’s an actual studio, and it’s not new to you guys. You were there not that long ago, right?
Maggie: Yeah, we were there last fall. We did one of their Stone Cottage Studio Sessions. But at that time, they were in a different location. They’re now in a new spot, which I believe is in downtown Boulder.
Shane: I think what’s special about it is it’s an actual recording studio. They record and film the entire show, where everything is set up as if you were cutting a record. So it’s a different experience, and it’s gonna be a really great audio experience. I’m sure everything’s gonna sound fantastic.
Maggie: And it’s gonna feel more like a house concert, which we love. We love telling the stories behind the songs, to intimate crowds. Those are some of our favorite shows to play.
Shane: I think that’s where we really shine, too. And we’re able to really connect on a deeper level. And, you know, we love Boulder, so we’re looking forward to being back here.
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My thanks to Maggie and Shane for taking the time to talk with me. And an extra thank you to Shane, for keeping both Maggie and me in stitches during much of our conversation.
The Imaginaries will be performing at Stone Cottage Studios on Tuesday, September 2. Head to https://stonecottagestudios.ticketspice.com/the-imaginaries for tickets.
There are two ticketing options available. There are an extremely limited number of in-studio tickets (where you will be in the studio with The Imaginaries as/when they perform). Those tickets include a meet and greet with Maggie and Shane. There are also tickets available for two viewing rooms, outside of the actual studio space. In-studio tickets are $58.20 and viewing room tickets are $43.20.
Fever, the new album by The Imaginaries, will be available on August 22. In the meantime, videos for half the songs on the new album are available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@TheImaginaries/videos).
Interview/story by Rick Witt www.rickwittphotography.com
Photo credits as noted
