Feature: 60 seconds with Thompson Square

Ahead of their first ever UK tour, Maverick sat down with Keifer and Shawna Thompson – who make up the duo that is Thompson Square – and found out what to expect 
You will be in the UK for September for the Long Road, then you’ve got a UK tour on the back of that as well. How are you feeling about that?
(Shawna) It’s a bucket list thing. Since we started Thompson Square, we had always talked about going over or trying to get over there to play and to see it coming to fruition is pretty crazy. We just can’t wait.
Is there any reason why it’s taken such a fair while to get over the Atlantic?
(Keifer) We’ve been asking for years and we just weren’t really allowed to do that. Now we’re in a place where we can do what we want, so the first thing that we put on the agenda was to figure out a tour in the UK.
Unless UK fans visited America to see you guys play, they won’t really know what to expect from your live show – so what does a typical Thompson Square show entail?
(Keifer) It’s the greatest show on earth! We try and put on the same kind of show that we like to go and see, so like a pseudo Springsteen situation, where you have tempo and rock songs, then you have story songs and sad stuff and have this full range of different kind of music – which is what we write and what we record.
(Shawna) Acoustically our shows are a little more low key, though.
(Keifer) Oh yeah – our acoustic shows are just a stripped down versions of the big one.
(Shawna) We love it though, it’s like a guitar pool in Nashville and we just like to share where the songs came from and how we found the songs if we didn’t write them, or what inspired each other’s songs as we’re playing our set.
(Keifer) You have to remember, we started out acoustically too and we’ve always loved that format. We do about 30 shows a year in America, so we experimented and did it a couple of years ago and we just loved it, so we just kind of kept it going.
To be able to go over there and to my knowledge, with listeners or fans over there who…I’m probably going to say this completely wrong, but the UK audiences don’t mind listening to songs and they don’t mind diving into the lyric, then going back and going through somebody’s catalogue. It’s going to be really cool to be able to strip this stuff down and play for everybody.