Schwervon’s Matt Roth and Nan Turner consider their creative future

The kitchen inside Matt Roth’s childhood home in Shawnee has changed little over the years. Vintage magnets, collected from various U.S. cities, are arranged in careful rows on the refrigerator. Dark-orange and avocado-green utensils hang from the cabinets and the walls. The floor, a brown-and-gold geometric motif, meets a bold lime-colored shag carpet as the kitchen gives way to the living room. It feels a bit like stepping onto the set of That ’70s Show.

Nan Turner, Roth’s girlfriend of 15 years and his creative partner in the rock duo Schwervon, loves this artfully retro clutter. Sitting at the small kitchen table, she smiles brightly as she and Roth explain how they got here. In April 2012, after nearly two decades in New York City, the couple moved into this house. Roth’s father, Harry, had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

“In 2010, when my dad had half a lung removed, I came back here to this house to live with him for a month while he was going through it,” Roth says. “We were also in the middle of feeling this frustration of living in New York and it being so expensive. So he’d said, ‘Well, you can move back here, and I need someone to help me with the space anyway.’ He’s on an oxygen tank now. And we wanted to tour more, and this is a central location for that, so it was just an opportunity — something good out of a bad thing.”

The move also gave guitarist Roth and drummer Turner the idea for their next album, last September’s Broken Teeth. Driven by a desire for new material to tour on, the duo spent the first half of 2014 working on new songs but found themselves butting heads during a lot of the creative process.

“That’s always been challenging for us,” Turner says. “Songwriting has always been a sort of tug of war, until it eventually breaks through.”

The breakthrough came when the two decided that instead of forcing out brand-new songs, they would take their 2006 album, I Dream of Teeth, and rework it.

“We haven’t had a totally new album for a couple years, so we felt like we were under pressure,” Roth says. “To get us out of the whole idea of the pressure of creating things, we went back to playing some songs that we hadn’t played in a while, and to limit ourselves, we decided to do them acoustically. We’re not the loudest band, but we’re definitely a rock band, so experimenting like that helped us to discover this whole new power. It took the pressure off.”

Broken Teeth features two covers and six cuts from I Dream of Teeth, but the nine-year-old songs are hardly recognizable in their reimagined state. While Schwervon maintains its lo-fi aesthetic — Broken Teeth was recorded in the couple’s basement bedroom — it’s a far quieter effort than what has come before. Opening track “Flaming Dragonfly” features Turner’s lighthearted voice in a series of oh-oh-ohs that begs a sing-along. In this song, and throughout the rest of Broken Teeth, Roth’s voice — a sulky, ’90s-era croon — is the foundation of the album’s offbeat melodies and soft folk.

But later, in Schwervon’s laundry room–meets–practice space, all sense of quiet has been banished. Seated at her drum kit, Turner jubilantly hammers out beats to a handful of songs as Roth takes up his electric guitar. Turner seems to be smiling at all times, even as she stares intently at Roth as they play. Roth stands before his microphone, almost immobile, eyes clenched shut as he sings. If you were only watching the room and unable to hear it, you might assume that the two were playing different songs.

Yet they are totally connected: Roth’s guitar riffs flow directly into Turner’s ticking of the cymbals, her butterfly-light voice a perfect complement to his indelicate buzz. Unconventional, discordant notes find their way into every Schwervon song, little flags indicating where Roth and Turner are making their push-and-pull work.

“We’re a couple, and we fight like a couple,” Roth tells me early in our discussion. “And then we play music, too, so we fight like a band and a couple.”

“It’s really hard to separate one thing from the other,” Turner agrees.

After such a long period together — as both a couple and a musical act — what is it, I wonder, about this creative partnership that works for Schwervon? There’s a long pause as Turner and Roth consider each other.

“I think the biggest thing is realizing how hard it actually is to do this,” Roth says at last. “I think our musical-career path is on a very, very slow upward trajectory, and that’s how it feels. So you try to stay levelheaded about it, and remember the work and sacrifice that we’ve put into it.”

Turner nods as she listens to Roth speak, and he splays his hands on the table and laughs a little. This is the path of a DIY band, they say: a lot of work for slow progress. But Schwervon has lasted this long, and Turner and Roth say they’re happy where they are.

“I get anxiety about not doing this,” Roth says. “I used to watch musicians say stuff like, ‘I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’m not qualified.’ And I used to think that was kind of bullshit, but now I get it. If you do it long enough, you can’t really do anything else. I’ve been out of the professional world for so long. You get worried. How could I exist in a normal job, at this point?” He shares a smile with Turner. “And that’s kind of exciting.”