Lawrence’s Toughies show a softer side

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Carl Smith stands over the grill in his front yard, tongs in one hand, beer in another. Strips of marinated chicken breasts are cooking, but Smith, our wayward “grill master” — as he insists on being called — has not glanced down at these pieces in some time. He has been too busy answering my questions about his band, Toughies, to be truly attentive.

“Do you want to flip that?” bassist Joe Gronniger says gently.

Smith, the band’s lead singer and guitarist, obliges.

“I think you burnt it, babe,” drummer Caroline Lohrenz — also Smith’s girlfriend — tells him, eyeing the blackened skin.

“I charred it,” he replies. Lohrenz, Gronniger and guitarist Brad Girard make faces at him while his back is turned.

When they aren’t playing music together, the band members are eating, and on this unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in November, I’ve been invited to join what the Toughies assume is their last cookout of the season.

Smith, who is “a pusher,” Lohrenz warns me, has twice offered to make me a bloody mary before I’ve found a seat. I remind myself that I’m on assignment, so I accept only Smith’s third offer.

“He thinks he’s a hot-shot bartender,” Lohrenz tells me as Smith happily ducks inside to prepare my drink, abandoning the fresh row of brats that he has just set on the grill.

It’s easy to forget that I’m here to interview the Toughies about their September-released debut EP, Tough Enough, or their forthcoming EP, which is out Tuesday. We mostly discuss food and argue over who gets to select the next song on Spotify, playing from Smith’s docked iPhone.

The four bandmates must return to real life tomorrow: Gronniger to his accounting job in Kansas City, Lohrenz to her kindergarten classroom, Smith to his graphic-design work. Girard has only a few hours before he must leave for an afternoon shift as a hotel concierge. I feel a little guilty infringing upon this precious and rare period of tranquility. Though Toughies has been a band for about a year, the men have known each other since they were in high school in Topeka. Lohrenz, a Wichita native, has been dating Smith for nearly four years; the band began with them.

“We wanted to be in a band when we first started dating,” Lohrenz tells me, “but it wasn’t really working with just the two of us.”

Gronniger can’t resist: “The relationship was failing, so they invited Brad and I on.”

“It’s very polyamorous,” Smith adds dryly, resuming his position at the grill.

“Carl was making a website for our old band, Haunt Ananta,” Girard says. “And Carl showed us these demos he had written with Caroline, and we were like, ‘These are amazing. You guys should play a show with us.’ And it just made sense to flesh out these demos that they had already been working on, so we kind of started doing that. And then our old band broke up. So there we were, the four of us, ready to be a unit.”

The six songs on Tough Enough were recorded “the hard and fast way,” Girard says, in a friend’s basement (belonging to Quinton Cheney, who fronts the nerd-rock ensemble Panda Circus, of which Lohrenz was a member for a time). A few surfy elements — breezy ooh-ooh-ooh choruses, rollicking rhythms — appear in the comfortable pop rock. Toughies keeps it mellow, despite the band name, its sound sometimes approaching the psychedelic dream tones of Real Estate. Lohrenz is careful not to overwhelm with her drumming, preferring the lighter work of brushes.

But for all that glitters in Tough Enough‘s 29 minutes, Smith’s singing is a grainy, corrosive element, a punch to the melody. Yet there’s something tender in the way he works the apologetic “What Are Hands For.” In “Birthday Party,” he’s plaintive, a convincing victim of age as he begs the listener to attend. Smith’s voice isn’t beautiful, but he more than makes up for it with character.

At the request of my photographer, the band sets out for an impromptu acoustic jam. Gronniger is at first upset that he has nothing to contribute — his bass is electric, and there’s no point in bringing it out — but Smith insists that he take up the crucial shaker. Lohrenz grabs a tambourine. Girard and Smith pick up guitars, and the four arrange themselves alongside the house.

I observe them as they run through a new song, “What Are Hands For,” that is featured on a forthcoming EP (which they plan to release in January, if the home recording goes as planned). Through the trees, the sun casts patterns on their faces. Smith is buoyant, like a child at recess; he could do this all day. Gronniger, bless him, is taking his shaker duties more seriously perhaps than he has taken our entire interview. It’s perfect.

Later, after we’ve stuffed our faces with charred chicken (there were no leftovers), potato salad and brownies (that a friend of Lohrenz’s had swooped in and dropped off, like a personal picnic angel), the band decamps around Smith’s patio table.

“The goal is to make Toughies the best it can be,” Gronniger tells me as he scrolls through his phone. (He’s in the middle of finding the perfect Bee Gees song for our afternoon soundtrack.) “It’s not like I want to be the most well-known bass player in Lawrence. That’s not going to happen. But I think, when you’re younger and in bands, it’s much more of like a ‘Let’s go out and drink really hard and be rock stars’ thing. This is like everyone is in a good place in their lives. And we’re just trying to make stuff that we’re going to be proud of.”