Single Premiere: Goatroper, ‘You Don’t Rub Me Right’
The upstart Minneapolis act releases their first single on Bandcamp tomorrow. Get an exclusive preview right here and find out how this brand new band got their start!
Goatroper’s “You Don’t Rub Me Right” single artwork by Rudy Jansen.
Twin Cities country band Goatroper may be brand new—they started forming barely a year ago—but they already feel like a seasoned outfit. Maybe it’s their combined experience: Founding members Abbey Janii and Mike Lee collectively bring a wealth of it to the act—though it’s from genres like rock, blues, folk and even musical theater. Drummer William Flynn was previously in Janii’s rock band Julie Fur. Bassist Taylor James Donskey transcends genres, having played in countless bands of all stripes.
Or maybe it’s Lee and Janii’s connection: Acquaintances in South Dakota over 15 years ago, they reconnected in Minneapolis in 2021, instantly clicked musically and also started seeing each other. Janii, who plays piano/keyboard as well as guitar, had recently put out a solo EP with a new-to-her sound. “I’d been rock for so long,” she says, “and I was in musical theater. I was sick of writing songs on piano so I started writing songs on guitar, and they sounded a bit more country.”
“After I heard that EP, I knew I wanted to make music with Abbey,” Lee says. He’d started out playing blues and had been a folk singer for a while, but “country music is always in there for me. My grandpa plays country music, and he taught me the first songs I ever learned. I tried to rebel against it, but it came back and found me anyway.”
The duo got crowd-tested fast: Their third show together (after Sociable Cider Werks and a backyard) was opening for The Clover Fold at Levitt at the Falls amphitheater in Sioux Falls in front of about 2,500 people. “It was terrifying,” Janii says. “It was like, ‘We’re not supposed to be doing this yet!’” Despite their jitters, Lee says, “It went off pretty well!”
The band came together soon after that. “We got pretty lucky,” Lee says. “Taylor plays bass with us and he plays with so many people around town; he’s got this great mind for it. You play him a new song and he kind of music-directs it, like ‘oh, we should do this here.’ Their drummer Flynn, who went to high school with Janii in South Dakota, was in her rock band Julie Fur and agreed to move over to Goatroper with her.
Abbey Janii & Mike Lee. Photo credit: Luigi Morris 2022.
The band’s name, Lee explains, refers to a Jerry Jeff Walker song lyric where “he talks about a ‘Goatropers need love too’ bumper sticker. A goatroper is somebody who has all of the country trappings, they wear cowboy boots and a Stetson hat and stuff, but would be useless on an actual ranch.” Janii adds, “Because we’re doing this kind of countrypolitan thing, it seems pretty appropriate.”
“I like to think of our music as that cosmic American music thing,” says Lee. “It's folk music, and it's rock music, and it's country music, and it's R&B, all kind of mixed in a big pot.”
The Single
“You Don’t Rub Me Right,” the first song on an album to be released next spring, tackles an issue very common and very specific to women who go to bars: the guy who immediately sets off warning bells and gets more and more toxic or threatening the more they’re rebuffed.
It’s so much the norm that most of us don’t bother to comment on it much, if at all, but Goatroper (with Janii on lead vocals) unspools it in this song, with pinpoint accuracy, shining a light on one of the extra pitfalls and perils of being a woman who loves the nightlife. “You don’t rub me right / I think you’re trouble and I think you know I’m right,” the refrain goes.
“It’s one of the first country songs I wrote,” Janii says. “This doesn't happen very often, but it just kind of poured out pretty quick. It was one of those that was probably just sitting there for a long time, being frustrated at bars. I didn't realize how relatable it was until after playing it out, and women always come up to me after shows like ‘That's exactly how I feel.’ That feels really good: to actually put into words how women sometimes feel in these environments.”
It inspired Lee, too; their next single that’s coming out soon, he says, was “a reflection of those feelings,” written from the perspective of a woman who could be the same character from Janii’s song.
Mike Lee & Abbey Janii at Sociable Cider Werks. Photo credit: Joseph Stryuk, 2022.
“You Don’t Rub Me Right” was recorded in the home of Tim Evenson, who also produced it. Evenson, who fronts the Minneapolis country band Pleasure Horse, played several instruments on the track. “Tim’s kind of a musical savant,” Janii says. Lee agrees: “It was just the three of us kind of going crazy over the course of three, four days hanging out in the living room. That was a really great experience!”
The single drops tomorrow, Friday, Nov. 4, exclusively on Bandcamp (just in time for Bandcamp free Friday, hint hint!), with a wider release to the streaming platforms the following Friday. You’ve got two upcoming chances to see Goatroper live in Minneapolis yet this month: Friday, Nov. 11 at Palmer’s Bar and Wednesday, Nov. 30 at Icehouse.
Get an exclusive first listen to “You Don’t Rub Me Right”
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the primary music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley!
