Header image credit: @emma_essersnaps5
Back in February 2025, I got to chat with Jenna Horgan and Victoria Nelson from Durham rock band Kinda Nice. Recounting their band’s history included plenty of love for Chicken Ranch Road Show, who is more like a “sister band” than mere friends. And for good reason: Patsy Sibley (guitar/vocals) put Kinda Nice together as part of Girls Rock NC and served as their first band manager. Their relationship came full circle when Chicken Ranch Road Show opened for Kinda Nice’s EP release show.
I knew I had to get the other side of the story, so I reached out to Robin (guitar) to set up an in-person chat. We met at Ali’s (drums/vocals/guitar) house before a band practice, with Patsy calling in periodically to add her answers. It didn’t take long to spot parallel experiences with Kinda Nice, forged by wildly different experiences coming together to create novel fun for all involved.
[For what it’s worth, Ali’s cat Mojo quickly stole my heart but only occasionally distracted me from our awesome conversation.]
What is your role in the band?
Ali: I’m on drums. Sometimes guitar and vocals.
Amanda: I play bass, no vocals here.
Robin: I play guitar.
Isabel: I play the fiddle and sing.
Patsy: And I also play guitar and sing!
What’s something y’all have been listening to lately?
Ali: I’ve been listening to a lot of The Marias.
Robin: Palmyra’s debut full-length [Restless], which they just released. They’re out of Richmond.
Amanda: A ton of Soundgarden.
Isabel: I was listening to the Rent soundtrack on the way over. [laughs] There’s a video of Rachel Bloom, who did the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and her husband doing karaoke with a friend playing the piano. But she’s the only one who knows the words. So she’s singing, he’s improv-ing responses to it, and it’s hilarious.
Who is the first musician that you remember discovering on your own and obsessing over?
Ali: Metric, and I’m still obsessed with them.
Isabel: Spice Girls. I had a Spice World cassette tape that I played until it wasn’t a tape anymore.
Robin: The first one who comes to mind is The Mars Volta. I can trace back the amount of money I have spent on guitar pedals to them.
Amanda: Mine would be Led Zeppelin. [Led Zeppelin I] was my first CD, unlike anything I had ever heard. I’ve just wanted to rock out ever since.
What’s the origin story for Chicken Ranch Road Show?
Ali: Girls Rock NC hosts a band summer camp for gender-expansive youth without having to pay for anything. And once a year, they did Rock Roulette for adults. You sign up, and they put you with four or five random people. You have six weeks to write two songs and pick another to cover. That’s where me, Amanda, and Isabel met and performed as Spice Coven.
Isabel: After Rock Roulette, we said, “We really like each other and want to keep playing music together.” I was already close with Robin and Patsy, and we had also talked about maybe making music together. So we just combined forces. Patsy was significantly involved in Girls Rock NC and Rock Roulette; she specifically assigned us to each other.
At Hopscotch 2023 Patsy, Robin and I saw a band called Teddy and the Rough Riders. They had this song that mentioned “cowgirl ragtime band.” I turned to Patsy and said, “I want to be in a cowgirl ragtime band.” And Patsy said, “We can!” That kind of guided the theme.
Patsy: That lyric is in one of our songs, so it lives on.
Ali: I was like, “I guess I’ll learn the drums.” I’d always wanted to learn, so it was an awesome opportunity to push me to learn.
Isabel: That was also when we really started bringing in originals and having a clear sound.
When did y’all start performing live as this current five-piece lineup?
Ali: March 2024. We did a show in my backyard.
Isabel: And then we played the Manifest Festival a week later, which is insane. It was also really fun. After that, people started asking us to play shows.
How would you describe the band’s typical process for writing songs?
Robin: Isabel, Patsy, and I do most of the lyric writing. We usually lay out some song structures, and then the band just makes it our own. We don’t have a lot of training, and we all come from very different musical backgrounds, so there is no telling what a song will turn into once it gets in the room. Sometimes we’re shooting for something when we start looking at a song, but in the past, it’s often been us putting the song in the room and seeing what people want to do with it.
Isabel: Robin and Patsy live together and are together, so do a lot of songwriting together. When I bring a new song, if there’s something really important to me about pacing or a certain sound, I’ll lay that out at the start and say, “These are the two things that are important to me to keep.” But then, because it’s so different to play alone at home than to play in a room with all five of us, it really does just evolve.
A core tenet of our band has always been playing a part you enjoy. It’s crucial that everyone write a part for themselves or take what’s there and shape it into something that’s fun. And that always creates whatever it’s going to create.
Image credit: connordavisphotography
What is your relationship with music as a creative expression?
Ali: Since I was little, music has always been one of my biggest safe places and regulating activities. Being able to form a relationship with everybody in the band through music has just created a community and a safer place to express myself, which has been really nice.
Amanda: I’ve never done songwriting. Rock Roulette was the first time I had to write a song, and I’ve never approached music that way. I felt like it made me start seeing music differently. It was very overwhelming. I’d listen to songs, and suddenly I’d hear new stuff I hadn’t heard because I hadn’t approached it from a songwriting lens.
I found it too complicated and I abandoned it. [laughs] But it was weird for me to have those two weeks of seeing music differently. Music’s always been very important to me, but I’ve never considered it that way. It’s cool when you can start isolating parts.
Robin: I spent a lot of time writing songs before I spent any time playing them in front of people. That’s been true for probably 20 years. Songwriting has been really important to me, but performance not so much. My relationship with music is evolving in the process of being in this band, which is really about performance and that give-and-take with a room.
I think we’re getting into a performance vibe that is really good. Or, the vibe continues to feel better and better over time. We’re having more fun; that kind of public catharsis is important and good for me.
Amanda: Our best shows are when the crowd is participating with us. It’s less like we’re just performing for them.
Ali: Writing and playing have always been so personal, but it has been really cool to be able to make them more consistent public activities.
Isabel: I started doing singer-songwriter songwriting in high school. That was pretty isolated in terms of where I was doing the songwriting itself. I started playing in bands in high school. I was in a few duos and then played in a couple of other groups before this, but I hadn’t ever played out at clubs this much. With that comes having more intentionality around the sound of our band. What is the message that we’re bringing to the world? What is the energy that we’re co-creating? Those are things that I was really longing for in a band space.
In the bands I played in before, either I was the only songwriter or I was in a trio where all of us wrote songs. This group has been more cohesive overall, and that’s been a comfortable, creative place to be, whether I’m learning to improvise or to write a part for myself that feels fun and is different. There’s so much solidity in other areas of our social dynamic and songwriting approach that there’s room for creativity and fun.
Patsy: My relationship with music is long and loosely held. I have sort of the classic Deep South music story: I sang in the choir at church, my grandmother played the organ and taught me how to play a little bit. I always loved music, but when deciding what I would do for money, I thought I had to do something really pragmatic. So I didn’t play music for almost ten years, because I was getting a bunch of degrees in psychology. Dumb.
When I finished my Ph.D., I looked at my life and said, “I’ve got to start playing music again.” So I started volunteering with Girls Rock NC really intensely. Robin taught me how to play four chords on a guitar, and I was like, “It was good enough for Johnny Cash, let’s go!” Volunteering at Girls Rock NC and helping kids learn how to write their own songs pushed me to do it, too. If I can help a seven-year-old write their song about space, I can figure out how to write my songs.
So I signed up for Rock Roulette in 2018, which was amazing. And I just never stopped. There was just something about that experience of doing this, even though I’m in my 30s and will never do it for a living. That’s okay. I get to make something, and that’s really exciting.
It’s intoxicating once you realize you don’t need anyone’s permission to be in a band with your friends and make cool shit. You don’t need anyone else to tell you it’s good or allowed. You can just decide to do it together. And now I want to do it forever. That’s what being in Chicken Ranch has been like; we’re just figuring out how to help each other create something we’re all really proud of.
Amanda: It’s weird being in your 30s doing it. You have a job already and it’s all purely for fun. There’s no pressure. It’s just about having fun. If this were high school, I would be having a meltdown.
Image credit: akw.96.photos
Do y’all have any goals for the rest of the year?
Robin: There may be a small summer tour that will manifest. It’ll be our band’s beach episode.
Ali: We want to record an album, too. It would be awesome to play a local music festival sometime in the next year.
Who are your favorite local/NC bands?
Robin: Kinda Nice, obviously.
Ali: I like Moses Sumney out of Asheville and Sally Rose.
Isabel: John Rodney is super local and wonderful.
Robin: Riggings is also local. She’s amazing. And we love the boys in Long Relief! We might be touring with them this summer. Charles Latham is phenomenal.
Amanda: Matt Southern, Kit McKay, and all the folks with Honeyguide Collective. We played with a band called The Rattletraps and they were crazy good.
Any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Robin: One thing I’ve had to keep saying to myself is that art is not a luxury. Because shit is dire right now and has been dire for a while. A lot of time, energy, and money goes into making music, performing, and stuff like that. When you’re feeling a little down on yourself, it can feel self-indulgent, maybe even wasteful sometimes. But then you get the right room and you’re like, “No, this is actually creative in more ways than one. It’s generative.”
Ali: There are people in war times who smuggle music when it’s illegal. That’s when I realized it is a necessary addition to life. To get through that other shit.
Isabel: An important discovery of this band has been finding people to make art with whom I can be totally vulnerable. This is that group of people for me. I’ve played in musical situations where I’ve been friends with and loved the people I was playing with. But I was not at a place in myself to hit that level of vulnerability.
It’s so different when there’s a high level of comfort where you can say the thoughts that are a little edgy or put a song out there when it’s not totally finished. And that’s just the norm. It’s been really creatively expansive.
Ali: It’s helped me be that way in other parts of my life, too. Being friends with you guys and being vulnerable has given me the confidence to do that outside the band.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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