The Blackbird Revue gets comfortable with its wings

The Blackbird Revue’s Jacob and Danielle Prestidge are making their own ambience. Danielle stands in front of her keyboard, her gaze level with Jacob’s face. Eyes clamped shut, fingers sharp on his guitar strings, he begins to sing the first verse of “The Devil’s Hand.” His tenor cuts into the song’s desolate melody like a diamond on glass. Danielle comes in on the second verse, her voice so elegant and featherlight that, on this opening night of the 2015 Folk Alliance International Conference, you almost forget that their set is going over not in a hushed theater but in a small, bright conference room.

In this cozy setting, the pair of eager latecomers who burst into the room can easily see the scowling disapproval of audience members here to be spellbound. The Prestidges’ concentration is unbroken, and the song goes on. The harmonies, here and through the rest of the set, stay pitch-perfect.

“Initially, it did not beautifully fall into place,” Danielle Prestidge tells me a month after that performance. I’m standing in the kitchen of the south Kansas City home that she and Jacob have furnished with quirky midcentury finds. They’ve been married five and a half years, together as a band for six. He is 35, she 29. Danielle pulls cookies out of the oven, and Jacob asks me if I’d like some milk with mine. We move to sit at a large dinner table, where a mounted deer head can watch over our conversation.

“There were so many times that I almost broke it off,” Danielle continues.

“In both ways, romantically and musically,” Jacob adds, nodding. He sits with his body turned toward his wife, his foot propped on the bottom of her chair. They’re a matched set, both dressed in 1970s-vintage garb, Danielle wearing her usual silver-and-black eye makeup, part of the Stevie Nicks look she has cultivated.

“There are a lot of parallels between our romantic relationship and our musical relationship,” he says. “There are some people who meet and instantly fall in love, and everything is really easy. And there are some singers and band people who get together, and it clicks right away. And neither of those things happened with us.”

Shortly after meeting Jacob, when she was a senior at the University of Kansas, Danielle abandoned her own solo pursuits to join his project, which would become the Blackbird Revue. She says she felt strongly called to become involved with Jacob’s music, but she agonized over the choice all the same.

“I had really enjoyed creating my own sound, building that myself,” Danielle says. “I spent four years in college waiting to have the freedom to really pursue music the way I wanted, and not even six months before I graduated, I met this guy and started doing music with him. And to try and have my own band and still make music with him, I felt like that would take away from what he was doing and what I wanted to do, somehow. I didn’t feel like I could give both things the attention they needed.”

“That’s not me saying that, by the way,” Jacob adds.

But the shift that might have altered the couple’s music most didn’t start with either of them. In August 2014, guitar player Joseph Peaks left the Revue to focus on other projects. The full five-piece band that the Prestidges had been performing with at certain shows was also facing scheduling conflicts. For the first time, the Blackbird Revue would be the Prestidges and only the Prestidges — which was exactly what they needed.

“We had thought of it, but it wasn’t until our guitar player left that we really felt like we could pull it off by ourselves,” Jacob says. “At that point, it was a little bit of, ‘Well, we kind of have to.’ And that made us get a lot more serious about it.”

Danielle also began writing songs again, after years of Jacob’s being the principal songwriter. As they plan sessions for their first full-length album this year, the two figure they’ll collaborate on the songwriting.

“We were talking about how we need to put out new material — because it’s been two years [since 2013’s Glow EP], and that was just four songs — and my dad said, ‘When you only put out four songs every two years, it makes people think you don’t care about it,'” Jacob says. “I feel like the opposite is actually true with us. I care about it so much that I’m not willing to spend any less than we need to spend to make a fantastic product. So if it takes us that long to get the money together to do something right, then that’s what we’re going to do. And that’s why we’ve waited so long.”

Glow was a warm effort, but so far, the new material from the Blackbird Revue — “The Devil’s Hand” as well as the exquisite pop-folk song “Blueprints” (written and sung by Danielle) — suggests a band ready to be noticed.

“I feel like our musical career has moved forward more in the past seven months than it has probably in the seven years before that,” Jacob says. “Musically, it was really difficult for a long time, but along the way, we learned to communicate and respect each other. It’s been difficult, but in the end, it’s certainly been rewarding. And we’re still pushing, still discovering in the moment what our true voice is.”