An informed gambler would have to assume, knowing the odds, that betting on bands to survive in the long-haul is a bad way to parlay one's cash. Anyone who's ever taken up arms with guitars and drums and vocals and songs with his or her compatriots knows the challenge is hardly an easy one. Think a relationship is hard? Try putting yourself in an environment where you must get along with, if not like, three or four others while also being on the same page artistically with them. No wonder the average lifespan of a band is probably something like one gig.

In a way, Hazeldine defied the odds. The group formed in 1995 by Albuquerque house mates Shawn Barton, Tonya Lamm, Anne Tkach, and Jeffrey Richards, and lasted, Richards aside, until earlier this year, when it was decided an open-ended hiatus was in order. In between, the quartet released four albums of Crazy-Horse-fuzzed harmony rock, took their vision to much of the western world, and garnered a solid fan base in Europe and critical acclaim nearly everywhere else.

That's the upside. The downside is a story of too many spirit-breaking elements working against them -- the toll of keeping personal relationships afloat, the toll of Barton's drug abuse ("Heroin steals your backbone," the guitarist says), the crush of a U.S. major-label debut never reaching record stores thanks, suits, lawyers, and mega business mergers, and the inability to ever really find their footing again in the wake. Soon, individual members were moving away from their womb that was Albuquerque to distant zip codes. Soon, the magic was lost.

What's left is four albums -- the Glitterhouse debut How Bees Fly (1997), the all-covers stop-gap Orphans (from All Swoll/E-Squared in 1998), the Polydor Records debut Digging You Up (released in Europe only in 1998), and the return-to-indie Double Back (from Okratone in 2002) -- and many what-ifs. It's not like Hazeldine was reinventing the wheel, but they did offer an engaging aural concoction of rock sweet and strong, traditional and forward thinking, masculine and feminine. And name one other band on the planet that can release an album where a cover of Radiohead's "Lucky" precedes Hank Cochran's "It's Only Love"? We might never know what America outside of the alt-country secret society would have thought of them.

Now a Florida resident, Barton is not thinking too much about music right now. But she knows that it's only a matter of time until the calling is answered. And chances are, it just might be Hazeldine all over again. "We definitely have talked about getting back together, putting another record out, and going over to Europe again, trying to do some U.S. stuff again," she says. "But right now we're all sort of concentrating on our own things." MoMZine editor Neal Weiss witnesses the debriefing.

MoMZine: Obvious question, what happened?

Barton: I think what happened with Hazeldine is, we had a bunch of good luck that came really fast, and then the bad luck followed quickly and it came really hard. And it was just one thing after another. But ultimately, the main reason I think that we decided to take a break was because we all just lived too far apart and it was so difficult to try to keep the machine going, you know? Being in a band is really a business and if your business partners are so far away it's hard to have the same forward momentum that you had when we all lived in the same house in Albuquerque.

MoMZine: Can you pinpoint the moment when you all realized you were done?

Barton: I don't think that there was one particular point where we decided. It was probably a long-time coming. We all lived in Albuquerque together and then Tonya moved to North Carolina maybe three or four years ago. So she sorta fled the coup. And from that point on everything just got more and more difficult. After that, we were dropped by Polydor, and, we did managed to get together and record and get together and tour but it was just more and more time between all of us seeing each other. We were sort of tentatively planning this tour with Nadine and Gingersol, we were hoping to do that but at the last minute Tonya pulled out because of her baby and it just seemed like it was so much work, so much effort, and it wasn't happening easily. Not that being in a band should be easy but…

MoMZine: Is it a sense of mourning? Relief?

Barton: I was pretty sad for about a week, and spent some time alone. I went off by myself, spent a bunch of time on the beach, which is sort of my church here right now. And now it's more a sense of acceptance. Things change and people change and time passes. I'm kind of eager as to what's gonna happen next for all of us.

MoMZine: You mentioned Hazeldine's initial good luck. What went right?

Barton: When we first started out we self-recorded our first record, the How Bees Fly CD, and we were really just in charge of our own careers at that point, where we personally sent it out and shopped it around. And we got signed to Glitterhouse, just from our own efforts, and we found a manager really quickly who was really helpful and then we applied to South By Southwest and it was first ever show outside of Albuquerque and that went really well. It just snowballed really quickly.


From the beginning I was always the person that said, "Let's find a good independent label, we need to find a good indie here in the states to sign to." And the first label that approached us in the states was Polydor and at the time that was the biggest record label in America. So we were all just so flattered and blown away. And we thought, "Are stupid if we say 'No?'" So we said, "Let's just go for it." By that point we had already been to Europe maybe four or five times and we went back again with Polydor's money and had this huge tour with a big bus and we'd only been together at that point maybe two, three years.

MoMZine: Was there a moment during that time when you sort of felt like you were on top of the world?

Barton: The first couple years of Hazeldine are a little foggy for me, but I remember when I was introduced to Thom Yorke from Radiohead. I said, "Wow, I'm shaking hands with my favorite rock star on the planet and living in a great hotel in Los Angeles, making this major-label record with this great producer [Jim Scott]." It did feel good right then, like, "Hey, this might actually work."

MoMZine: And it didn't. What went wrong?

Barton: What went wrong…Well our touring situation got a little stressful, and we had to get rid of one of the original members of the band [Jeffrey Richards] and that was a big blow for us because we had always considered ourselves such a tight-knit democracy of a band. And we really had worked on everybody moving forward together, lots of communication, trying to make sure everyone stayed happy and got what they thought they needed to get out of the experience, basically. And it just didn't work that way. It was just a conflict of personalities. And when that happened, and we started having to hire drummers and guitar players to go on tour with us, it just sorta strained it. The camaraderie got a little kick in the teeth and we realized it was more of a business at that point. And then once we had accepted that it was a business, the business spanked us by dropping us from Polydor when the whole Universal/Seagram's merger happened.

MoMZine: And that was the cruel reality when that happened?

Barton: I didn't really think it was that bad of a deal because I was never really happy to be on a major label anyway. And I was excited about the fact that we weren't tethered to them anymore. But we did lose our record [Digging You Up] in that deal. It was never released in the states and they still own it and it's probably gathering dust somewhere in a big warehouse in Los Angeles, buried right next to the Arc of the Covenant or something. So at that point I thought, we're free, let's go on and see what happens. But it was just a gigantic strain on everyone. And the explosion of that expectation really took its toll on our collective psyche.

MoMZine: There was great success overseas, but not in the states. Why the lack of success here?

Barton: I think it was a case of spectacularly bad timing. Right at the onset of us going, "OK we're gonna try and do the states now, since we've had so much success in Europe, and with the big Polydor machinery behind us something's bound to happen, and everybody at the label is so great and really supportive of us," then the merger happened. And it was like we kind of gave over the control of the band to Polydor. And when major labels merge and labels are dissolved it ends up taking forever. So it seems like it took us maybe a year or a year and a half before we were sort of in control of our own United States destiny, and at that point it just looked such a big job for us to take on again. Maybe in part that's because we were so spoiled by our team in Europe -- our label, our publicist, our booking people, the tour managers, and all the people we worked with over there with distribution and manufacturing. It was just such a great machine over there. They were all in contact with each other, everybody was on the same page. And in the states it was like, "Oh we're gonna have to assemble our own team here now." And we did four or five tours in the U.S., a couple that we real big and a couple that were a little bit smaller, and what an expensive nightmare. In Europe when you're on tour, not only do you get paid well but they buy your breakfast and your dinner and your hotel and they buy merchandise like it's on fire. It's so much easier to support yourself and finance a tour over there, whereas in the states we would have to have gone back to sleeping on floors. It's like, "OK, are we willing to take a couple steps back to try and make this happen?" And at that point the personal problems in the band were at such a fever pitch that we just had to stop and take our breath.

MoMZine: Did Hazeldine ever reach the creative height it imagined?

Barton: No. I don't. I mean I loved the creative process of making our last record, Double Back, and the writing of that and the way that it came together was really beautiful and recording with Chris Stamey in North Carolina was so wonderful. But at that point we had all been living apart for a couple years and it just wasn't moving forward anymore. Our creative energies weren't so much collaborative as they were just sort of pieced together. We would get together for two weeks and rehearse for two days and then record a record. Just like introduce each other to all of our songs and everybody work out their parts, and we've got two days and then we're gonna record it, and if we had been together I think we could have done a lot more for that CD. Although I do like that CD.

MoMZine: Do you romanticize the early days in Albuquerque, when you all lived together?

Barton: Have you ever been to the desert? There's real magic in that city. And we had such a great close-knit, gigantic group of friends that all lived within a mile of each other, and there was such a supportive musical scene there too. And living together, we were all really just family and it just so happened that we all could play instruments and we liked singing together and we just loved each other so much. We still do. But there's nothing like waking up together and having your first cup of coffee and then going to bed at night after a couple margaritas together. When you're together all day like we were for a while, it's the best thing on earth, having good friends like that.

MoMZine: Do you look at it as an innocent time?

Barton: We had issues. It wasn't all just lightness and love. You know Tonya and Jeffrey were breaking up from this long-term relationship and that was all in the band, in the van on tour. It was real tough times. And there were some drug problems happening. So it wasn't like this idyllic world where everything just kinda came together magically. We had to work at it back then.

MoMZine: After experiencing the downside, can you still capture the feeling of why you made music in the first place?

Barton: Absolutely. Every time I pick up my guitar. I just love playing and singing and writing. Now I have a column for a local paper here, so I'm still writing and there's just something so magical about words to me. And that's always sort of been my strength in the band too, the lyrics. And every time I pick up a pen it's like I can work myself into a total fever, like an exorcism, like fireworks. And I think it's the same for the girls too. I know that Anne is playing with Nadine and she is kinda going through the whole business aspect of that band right now. So she's getting her second dose of the machine. And Tonya's creating too in North Carolina with Tres Chicas, her band with Caitlin Cary and Lynne Blakey. They're talking about maybe doing a little East Coast tour, and I think Yep Roc is going to release their record. So we all still have that fever.

MoMZine: So as you move forward, what do you do differently?

Barton: Never join a band with a boyfriend and girlfriend in it -- rule number one. Never join a band with a junkie in it -- rule number two. Besides those two major problems, which were problems for us from the very beginning of Hazeldine, I think that we did everything right. We all loved each other and we supported each other and we were a real democracy. Everybody had an equal vote. And I would definitely want to take those things with me wherever I went musically.

MoMZine: When you look back, what's the musical moment you most proud of?

Barton: I guess that would be "Apothecary" off of How Bees Fly. The writing and recording of that record were really magical. We were doing some overdubs in our rehearsal space, which is right in downtown Albuquerque, right on Route 66, and we're all just kinda laying around and we've got the 24 track and our friend Ryan [Martino], the producer, and we're all laying on the floor of our recording space listening to this playback and we all just kinda sat up and at the end of that song and we were like, "Holy shit! This is something."

MoMZine: But we shouldn't look at this as the end of the band?

Barton: The last time we all talked we definitely talked about [the future]. We're just taking a break right now and when the mood strikes us we definitely could get back together. So we're all writing and just living our own lives separately right now. But we're all still in touch, still love each other and hope we get to make music in the future. All three of us are like, "Oh yeah, this isn't the end."

MoMZine: Would you go about it differently the next time? What if a major label came knocking?

Barton: I think we'd have to say no. Going back to fact that the band was so democratic, it was one vote against three for the Polydor decision.

MoMZine: What was you reservation?

Barton: I guess for a while, when I was in college or right our of college I was kind of a little indie-rock snob. None of my favorite bands were on major labels. When R.E.M. signed to Warner Bros. my heart broke. They were like my favorite little band. And I think, if anything we were all so educated, the whole Polydor experience really took us to school, and I don't think we would make that same mistake again.

MoMZine: How are you currently spending your time?

Barton: I haven't been that creative lately. I lived in Florida for a long time before I lived in Albuquerque and I was recently at an X concert, the reformed X, with Billy Zoom, even though he looks like he's about 80, and I saw some old friends of mine there who had always been in little punk bands back in the early- and mid-80s, and they said, "Oh, you're here now. Let's get together. Let's play." And I'm sort of considering that but right now I'm just busy with other things. I just moved and I'm getting ready to start taking some classes again and I just fell in love so I'm in this whirlwind of emotion right now. It's a good time to write but it's not really a good time to jump right into a band.

MoMZine: What are you studying?

Barton: Psychotherapy. Counseling. [laughs] Maybe I'll become a counselor of former addicts. Or maybe I'll actually make some money being a band therapist.