Two for the Road

Dogwood Moon is an acoustic duo that travels light and keeps things simple. Jonathan Grossman sings and plays guitar, and Laurie Gunning sings. Wow can she sing.

You can see for yourself when the duo does an afternoon gig Sunday at Borders Books in Thousand Oaks.

Only together for a little more than a year, the duo of Dogwood Moon already has released two CDs, plus doing a couple of songs in a Stephen King movie, “Sometimes They Come Back . . . Again.” Their song “Invaded” will be on the soundtrack of the next Quentin Tarantino film. The new album is “The Call To Infinity.” In a recent phone chat, the duo discussed all the fun they’ve been having.

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So you’re named for a flowering tree and that round thing in the sky?

Gunning: You’re the first one to make that connection. I used to have two dogwood trees in my front yard when I was growing up in Connecticut.

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No day jobs?

Grossman: No day jobs. We do about 20 shows a month, most of them in California. Then twice a year we go back East for a month or so.

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So with just two people and a guitar, you travel light?

Gunning: Very light. We have our own sound system and it fits in our tour bus, which is actually a Ford Escort. So it’s just the two of us and a guitar. It’s very simple to get around.

Grossman: But we are going to start playing more with a full band. I think we’ll do 18 gigs a month as a duo and two a month with a band. The bass and the drums get peoples’ blood pumping. It can be pretty explosive.

Gunning: But then some people who have been following us for a year tell us that we don’t need a band because two of us are dynamic enough.

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Are you stuck on the coffeehouse circuit?

Gunning: We do play coffeehouses, but also bars, larger venues and festivals. We did one festival not too long ago and they didn’t know us, so they gave us the 11 o’clock slot--that’s 11 in the morning. Most of the people were hung over or sleeping and we played for about 10 people. But after our hour, there were 100 people there and they were dancing. That was very gratifying.

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Wait a minute. Dogwood Moon has dancers?

Gunning: Oh yeah, from age 2 to 90.

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Who goes to see the group?

Grossman: We get a lot of couples. They see two people on stage, and usually two people approach us. Sometimes older couples tell us we remind them of themselves in younger days. Or they tell us we sound like the Indigo Girls.

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What’s the deal with acoustic music these days?

Grossman: I think it’s getting bigger. I think it’s a cycle. A few years ago, it was loud grunge music with Pearl Jam and Nirvana--two bands I really like--but now it’s almost a backlash, and we have MTV Unplugged. I’ve read interviews with Kurt Cobain when they asked how he wrote a song, he said that he’d get up at 3 in the morning, lie naked on his bed, and pick up an acoustic guitar. A lot of music has an acoustic orientation. John Lennon wrote “A Day in the Life” on an acoustic guitar.

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What does Dogwood music sound like?

Gunning: Acoustic pop music with irresistible vocal harmonies.

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How do you write a song?

Grossman: We write them together. We sit down and flesh out the harmonies, then I lock myself in the closet and write the lyrics. The lyrics are always the last thing to come--they have to be spontaneous. A lot of the songs are about confronting fear, and I get a lot of stuff out of the newspapers, especially the songs on the newest album. The Mayas and some geologists have decided the world is going to end in the year 2012. That’s what the song, “The Call to Infinity,” is about. But I’m an eternal optimist, and I think we’ll discover time travel in 2012.

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Which way is Dogwood Moon going--forward or back?

Grossman: Man, we’re going forward.

Gunning: We want to play the first concert on the moon. We’ll give backstage, or back-crater passes for that one.

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How did you two get together?

Gunning: We met through a vocal coach that we were both seeing about two years ago. I was studying voice because I wanted to sing in a musical. After I did that, I wanted to sing in a band. Jonathan had a rock band and he was looking for a backup female vocalist.

Grossman: Laurie came and auditioned and got the job. At the end of ‘95, the band broke up and we decided we wanted to continue as a duo. And it was evident that Laurie’s voice should be featured.

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So what’s the plan?

Grossman: We definitely want to get signed. We want to make ourselves so self-sufficient that we’ll have bargaining power when it comes time to make a deal. But we’re not desperate. We have two albums, we have press, we’re doing this everyday. Ani DiFranco has been a great inspiration. She said she plays music about 10% of the time, then runs her business the rest of the time. She’s right. But this whole thing is so gratifying.

Gunning: The important thing for us, though, is longevity. We’re going to be playing music whether we get signed or not. We’ve been doing this for more than a year now, and it’s so much work. Everybody thinks we sleep until 2 every afternoon and play all night. We don’t. We get up every morning, go to our office and start working on booking shows, mailing out press [releases] and talking on the phone. But we’re smiling the whole time.

BE THERE

Dogwood Moon at Borders Books in Thousand Oaks, 125 W. Thousand Oaks Blvd., Sunday, 2-4 p.m. Free. Call 497-8159.