Planes, trains and automobiles are all a part of summer travels, but one group of Hampton Roads musicians used their transportation to make art.
“What we wanted to share with people is that they can be creative no matter who or where they are,” said Caroline Scruggs, co-creator of the American Train Collective.
Last year, the American Train Collective started their journey across the country with eight members performing and composing music exclusively during a four-day train ride from the east to the west coast. On April 26, “First Leg,” the album with music from the trip, was released after a year of editing and work.
Just getting started
After Scruggs and Jeanette Corey graduated from the music program at Christopher Newport University, the pair were looking for a way to keep the music alive in themselves.
“We were both in a liminal place and trying to decide what the function of music was in life,” Corey said. “We wanted something purely fun after coming from school where music is drilled as a professional tool.”
Corey’s own mind surprised her when one night she had a detailed dream where she envisioned her and her friends playing music on a train and writing songs. The dream even laid out the route the train would take. To Corey, the dream presented her with an organized idea that she couldn’t resist.
Scruggs jumped on board and helped Corey recruit a group of musicians through Facebook. Once the trip was planned, the two went to a train station in New York and just hoped that the musicians would show up.
“There was no telling what we would sound like or if it would work, but we had to try,” Scruggs said.
Out of the fifty invited on Facebook, eight musicians from varying musical backgrounds came to the station to participate on the project.
Breaking down barriers
The eight members of the project spent four days together, breaking into small groups each day to compose songs. At the end of each night, the members put on a small concert for each other to show what they had created.
Along the way, Scruggs found that the more they played, the more musicians on the train also became interested in the project and sharing their own work. At one point, the group did a sing-a-long with an Amish couple in one of the rail cars. It is experiences like those that make the project unique, Corey said.
But it wasn’t all music and laughs, according to Scruggs. There were times when the exhaustion or travel or not showering or just being with the same people on a train for four days impaired creativity.
A large motive behind the women’s concept was to learn about the creative process and break through barriers or difficulties that a project like this might present.
“The biggest thing at first was acknowledging the awkward,” Corey said. “It was a group of strangers who had to make each other comfortable enough to be creative.”
But for Scruggs and Corey, these challenges are what made the project worthwhile.
The final product
It has been a year since the project began, and the women have put their work into “First Leg,” which is available on Band Camp.
With the success of the first trip, the pair has planned another for this year that will start July 30.
While it will be almost an entirely different group of people, the meaning behind the project and the process will remain the same. In this second iteration, Corey hopes to continue exploring music and pushing creative barriers to write songs while traveling the country in a moving train.
“We want to make an impact on these musicians and write unique music,” Corey said. “I know that at the end of these people’s lives, they will say ‘I am a songwriter.’”
