More People Should Really Know About: Ordinary Elephant

“They say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t say to you is, you will never forget an elephant” – Bill Murray

The story has been told before, many times during the seven years since the folk pop duo of Crystal and Pete Damore reached the conclusion they needed to come up with a name for their act. This is how Crystal explains it: “We named ourselves Ordinary Elephant because there’s no such thing as an ordinary elephant. Every single one is just this amazing, magnificent creature. And all of the everyday things we take for granted in life have a whole lot more to them, too, if you take the time to look.”

Or, if you take the time to listen to their songs spread over three distinctive albums, you’ll enjoy thoughtful and insightful lyricism with music that hooks listeners like a locomotive coupling boxcars. Of course, that’s not counting, as Pete points out, “This secret little album we made in Houston in 2015 called “Dusty Words and Cardboard Boxes.” It’s out of print now but it gave us the confidence that we had enough songs to make another record with more attention to detail.”

Let’s back up a few years to 2009 when Crystal and Pete first met at this unique little open mic night in Bryan, Texas. The rules were an act had to play at least two original songs before they got to do a cover song. That’s some pretty strong motivation for honing your songwriting skills, so the Damores wrote loads of songs and also got married amid crumpled balls of sheet music acting as confetti. At the time, both still had day jobs: Crystal had been a veterinary cardiologist (“clearly a path to songwriter”) and Pete was a computer programmer. But the open mic nights were coming to an end and so did their time in Houston.

“We sold the house and bought an RV, said Crystal, “and lived a nomadic lifestyle for years.” Pete kept his job but Crystal left hers, using the free time to expand her creativity and find out how much she missed that part of herself. She learned that music is what felt like home to her, not a house in Houston or Millie the RV. As they continued rolling down the nation’s highways, one day they entered New Mexico. “We were really enamored of that state,” Pete stated. “We have this majestic feeling every time we cross the border. One time we met a wonderful man named Jono Manson, who owned a recording studio in Santa Fe. We knew right away he was the right person to produce our first album for the indie label, Berkalin Records.”

The result was “Before I Go,” with the duo’s copious number of songs pared down to thirteen, among them such gems as ‘Leaving Kerrville,’ a melancholy account of witnessing a highway accident a few miles outside of the folk festival. Pete’s clawhammer banjo maintains the ambling pace on ‘Another Day,’ a song Crystal “wrote from the point of view of a person dealing with addiction, trying to keep the medicine of someone’s advice down and listen to what people are saying.” Her point-of-view shifts to a gay person whose family is not getting him on ‘Who I Am.’ She has a novelist’s gift for being able to switch from one character to the next, even going from a female to male perspective never feels forced. “Whatever the particular story calls for, I’ll have a character in my head and try to embody that one.”

The album’s title song finds the couple drifting through the quiet and crisp cold night of the New Mexico desert as described in a favorite Townes Van Zandt song. Before too long they’ll return to “a reminder of all we’re moving toward.” The last song Crystal wrote for this album wound up as its first. She tells of being at a songwriting workshop with Darrell Scott and finding her writing voice in something Guy Clark once said about the song writing you. “Guy is the person talking in ‘Best of You’, she revealed. “He was totally in my head while writing it.”

That album helped to put Ordinary Elephant on the map along with incessant touring, reviews in the press and word of mouth. “We had been traveling for a couple years,” said Pete, “and built this network of friends across the country through Folk Alliance.” In 2017 they picked up the prestigious award for Artist Of The Year from that organization.

Instead of rushing to release another album, Ordinary Elephant went out on tour. As Pete pointed out, “Touring lets you earn money as well as make a deep connection with the audience. Different people have the chance to hear your music.” Another aspect of touring he enjoys is when someone from the audience comes up to meet him after the show. “They’ll say how one song especially touched them, made them feel as if it was about them. That’s so rewarding.”

While off tour Crystal wrote songs and took voice lessons to expand her range. This resulted in fuller, more vibrant vocals on their second album, “Honest,” recorded in Nashville with renowned producer Neilson Hubbard at the controls. “For the first album we recorded together but in separate rooms,” Crystal said. “Neilson recorded us live in the same room so our parts couldn’t be separated. Later session musicians added bass, piano and guitar parts.”

The songs were informed perhaps by all the traveling, seeing things firsthand. Some of the lyrics represented heavy topics such as prejudice, depression, end of life issues, PTSD, and guiding children through an ever more complicated world. ‘Scars You Keep’ is one they still play at almost every show and it feels grounding to her. “We had gone to DC and walked to the Vietnam Memorial. We were not prepared for what that was going to feel like, seeing all of the names,” she recalled, “which led to a song about returning soldiers with PTSD, turning to alcohol and drugs to erase memories of war.”

‘Shadow’ is morose as well, as described by Crystal: “It’s like mixing depression with a grocery store, trying to go shopping when you’re in the middle of a it all.” It’s fortunate she wrote the song before recent runaway inflation caused the cost of groceries to skyrocket. “Yeah,” she mused, “that would have made it a lot worse.” ‘I’m alright’ was written from the perspective of a friend Pete had in college. “She was diagnosed with brain cancer a year after graduating,” Pete said wistfully. “She fought it for eight years while getting married and going to med school.” Crystal added, “I was thinking about how the one who’ll be caring for people now has to be cared for later. Trying to fathom what that may be like.”

The album was worth the wait, the title of a song Crystal wrote about moving into the RV. “We had to figure out what stuff to get rid of, what to bring along, never giving a thought to how much the stuff weighs rather than how it would fit. So, we had to ask is this worth the weight, which came out in the title as ‘Worth the Wait’.”

The last song on “Honest,” ‘Hope to Be That Happy,’ describes how a former dancing girl in NYC, now an elderly woman reminiscing about her life, finds happiness in a simple phone call. Before hanging up, she says, “Thank you for talking to me, ‘cause there are no telephones in heaven, but I heard there might be TV.”

All these characters and their struggles to find peace where trouble lurks, both outwardly and inwardly to paraphrase Canadian journalist Graydon Carter, can be compared to the noble elephants, admired not only for their immense presence but also because they demonstrate what are considered the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness and intelligence. But the way we treat them displays the very worst of human behavior.

The Damores then made the decision to come off the road, park the RV and buy a house in Opelousas, Louisiana, about 30 miles outside of Lafayette. “There is a Walmart in town,” said Pete, laughing. She wrote songs and poetry; he practiced on his instruments. They listened to music and enjoyed the slower pace of life. “Guy Clark, John Prine, Dave & Gillian, songwriters whose lyrics pull you in,” were a few Crystal named, adding, “Pete listens to a lot of instrumental music, progressive bluegrass like Darol Anger.”

Eventually the time came for a fourth album. As Crystal tells it: “This one is literally just the two of us in a room live.” It was produced in Bear Bridge, LA by multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, who insisted adding other instruments wouldn’t make it any better, so they trusted him. The self-titled album is bare, with less instrumentation and more room to hear the gorgeous harmonies of their blended voices. The studio was in a serene location, which you can see in pictures on the CD digipak and booklet, especially one with a shadow image of the Damores looking out at the sunset over Lake Martin.

You can read all about the eponymous album, reviewed in many publications focusing on Americana music including a splendid account in Americana UK. Crystal and Pete talked about these new songs as we sat on the back porch at Ted’s in Wilmington, North Carolina where Ordinary Elephant was performing the night of the album’s release. While looking at the old two-story house situated across the street from the harbor, Pete was talking about a house concert they had scheduled Sunday and just having booked another one for Monday. “Most of our shows are in intimate venues like this one, listening rooms where people can hear the lyrics. Crystal strives to stir emotions in people, so no matter what each individual gets out of a song it’s something relatable either to themselves or someone they know.”

Even with successful records to their credit, they hope more people will discover their music and attend their shows. Crystal discloses that, “It was scary at first and still is to a certain extent playing these venues and wondering how many are going to come out. That’s a good part of doing this as a couple because we have each other to lean on when it’s not going well.”

It’s hard to imagine worrying about attendance when their repertoire of contemplative songs has been enlarged by those from the new album such as ‘Say It Loud,’ where a connection is tested with someone in the black hole of depression when Crystal’s character pulls Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” from a shelf and finds a song on paper that has fallen from its pages. ‘Joy’ touches on finding gratitude for what you have rather than what isn’t happening for you, and ‘I See You’ concerns telling a future version of yourself not to worry because you’re sober at last.

The first song on the album is the ruminative ‘Once Upon A Time,’ which relates to finding comfort wherever you can to relieve anxiety in times of uncertainty at any point in human history. Sitting outside in the late afternoon calm, the Damores listened to what I had taken from that song, which is how we used to tell our kids to use the phrase “once upon a time” before telling a lie.

Waiting to load in and soundcheck, Pete was asked about the instrument he was cradling, which he called an octave mandolin. “This is a larger mandolin tuned a whole octave lower, more into the guitar range,” he explained. “Mine is an archtop, which produces more of a punch, and its lower tone and sustain really lends itself to our kind of music.”

On that night, they mixed songs from each album before an enthusiastic audience. Their music has more depth than you’d find in an ordinary folk duo. Perhaps one reason for this is the Damores appear to have a bond, whether sitting and talking about music, glancing at each other before one responds to a question, in harmony on stage or off. Even when only Crystal is singing, there is still a palpable connection as interwoven as the afghan your grandmother knitted for you, which generates a warmth not unlike what Ordinary Elephant projects as their songs captivate an audience.