Since teaming up as a duo in 2013, The Shires, guitarist Ben Earle, and singer and piano player Crissie Rhodes have risen to become one of the most popular Country acts in the world. Their first album, Brave, saw them become the first Country Music act to achieve a Top Ten album in the UK Charts. Their second album, My Universe, in 2016, debuted at Number 3 in the UK Album Charts, and became the fastest-selling British Country album in chart history. Since then, the duo have written in Sweden, and in Nashville, collaborating with some of the world’s most successful songwriters. The duo release their fifth album in July, and tour the UK in the autumn and winter of 2026. Acoustic Review’s Andy Hughes joined the pair for a chat about their careers, writing songs, and getting over the birth of twins (Crissie).
What’s on the horizon for you?
Ben – We have just confirmed a festival show, which will be announced, but I can’t say anything about it yet. It’s funny, because yesterday I paid a very large bill for something, and I was thinking about festivals, and wishing we did more of them, and then the phone call came in, it’s funny how things work out like that. It’s a festival we really want to play, so we are really excited.
Tell me about your first guitar, it’s usually a case of finding one lying around the house, because a parent or sibling has one, or you fancy learning, and get a guitar as a present.
Ben – I was a piano player, and a violin player, for years. My uncles were musicians as well, one of my uncles was the keyboard player in the band Then Jericho. So, when I visited my granny’s house, there were always guitars lying around, but I was never really that interested. I grew up in Wells in Somerset, and I saw an acoustic guitar in a music shop window, and decided I wanted it. I think the brand was new at the time, Faith Guitars, and it was a Venus model. So, I had that, and it’s really strange, my small son is learning to play, and he’s going through all the things I went through. He’s complaining that his fingers are hurting, but he really wants to keep playing, and I tell him he just has to push through the discomfort. My uncle bought me a book about guitars, and every other page there was a profile of a player, and I used to sit and read about Jeff Beck, and James Taylor, and Mark Knopfler. So that was my first guitar, the Faith Venus, and I still have it, although it has no strings on it just at the moment. It was my first guitar, and although it’s not as good as the one I play these days, it was perfectly OK, it could have been a lot worse! You always hear tales of guitarists who started out on really lousy cheap guitars, and then they get a decent one, and the difference is amazing.
Crissie – It’s interesting, one of our band told me the same thing. He said that if I wanted the twins to learn guitar, get a good one, because a lousy cheap one could possibly put them off playing before they really get started. It’s not exactly parenting advice, he doesn’t have children, but he is a musician, so I know it’s sound advice. He’s happy to spend my money!
What attracted you to Country music, it’s not really seen as a ‘British’ genre of music.
Crissie – It wasn’t years ago, but it is really popular now. Back in the day, it was always referred to as ‘Country And Western. And that was the music I was raised on. My gran used to play all the old stuff, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Jim Reeves, all the real old traditional songs and artists. We would sit and sing all day long. She had tapes and vinyl records, and my grandad was in the U.S. military, and came over to the U.K., and they became a couple. So my gran had access to the U.S. military bases, and she would go shopping, and find all these wonderful Country And Western albums and tapes. That’s how I discovered Country music. There was no Spotify, and there wasn’t a local radio station that played Country where I grew up, so that was how I came to discover it. When I was growing up, my Mum would tell her friends that I loved singing, and one of her friends gave her an Alison Krauss album. I remember listening to it and thinking, Wow, what an amazing singer! I was meant to give the album back, and I never did. It’s one of the most beautiful albums I have ever listened to. From there I went on to Faith Hill, she had a massive hit in the UK with a song called There You’ll Be, and then it was Shania Twain, and on from there. Growing up, you can spend whole days in your room just lost in the music you are learning to love. It’s magical to really listen to how professional singers sing, and from there, you learn to develop your own style as a vocalist.
Ben, when you write your guitar parts, do you have the sound of Crissie’s voice in mind, does it influence the way you construct songs as you write them?
Ben – Yes, definitely. We find it quite odd singing without each other. We do writing sessions separately, and then get together and work out what we have. I love the storytelling aspect of Country music. I’ll sit there and play a tune through, and I can imagine how it’s going to sound when Crissie’s voice is added to it. A massive influence for me is Lady A, Lady Antebellum as they used to be known. The way they play off each other is really effective. We have written songs separately, and that does work, but I do like it when I can imagine us singing together on something I am writing.
When you do get together with material you have written separately, is there a discussion about whose work is going to be kept in or left out?
Ben – We do know of duos, some famous ones, who have fallen out really badly. But for us, there is no ego in the studio. We never take anything personally. If I bring a song, and Crissie says it’s OK, but not her favourite, it’s not because she is angling to get more songs on the album, that’s just not how we work. Thinking about it, we have never had an argument about anything, so that obviously includes never falling out over work in any way. The song is first, it has to be first.
Crissie – There are loads of songs that just end up on Ben’s computer because they are just not right for the time, and the material we are working on. If something just doesn’t click, we say, OK, it was fun writing it, it’s not right for now, let’s move on, and that’s what we do.
How does the writing process work for you, how do you put your songs together?
Ben – Well, we have been going to Nashville for the last twelve or thirteen years or so, and it’s come down to be almost always lyrics first. I have reams and reams of stuff on my laptop, on my phone, sometimes it will just be a title, waiting to be developed. I watch a lot of movies, so often someone will say something that sparks in my mind, so I write it down, or I overhear something in a conversation, and again, something clicks and I make a note of it. So often a title will come first. And then, often when I’m in the shower, or in the car driving, and a melody idea comes, and I have loads of sections of recording which is me singing, with the sound of the shower in the background. I also run a lot, and four kilometres into a ten-kilometre run, something will hit me, and and my phone gets a breathless sound of me singing an idea. I think those times are when a section of the brain is just in neutral, when you do a mundane task that doesn’t require any conscious thought, and that’s when your mind will suddenly find an idea, and you get it down quickly. For me, the magic is writing songs, for Crissie, it’s probably more the performing of them, which makes us such a good team together. I love for the conception of the idea, no thought about where it comes from, when you catch something and make it into something, and as a musician, that is what I live for.
Crissie – For me it’s very different. I had my twins three-and-a-half years ago, so now I am looking after two busy toddlers at the same time, and we don’t have a lot of help around the house, so all my energy has been taken up with motherhood, and my creativity has kind of stalled on me really, through simply lack of time. I do love to get in a room and write, but it hasn’t happened to me for a while now, which is why I am so grateful that Ben can write so many songs, they just flow out of him. I love the songs that we have, and there is no ego, it doesn’t need to be personally from me, if a song is going to work for the album, that’s all I need to make it work.
Ben, do you use any effects for your acoustics?
Ben – I would never really describe myself as a ‘guitarist’. I am endorsed by Martin, and I have a couple of older models, and they have the Fishman Aura Plus pickups on them. They have the Aura Images feature, which gives you the sound of a miked-up acoustic. Now, I have a D28, which has an LR Baggs pickup fitted, which is wonderful. I do enjoy a really clear and simple sound, because they style of music I play for our songs is about the song itself, and not so much the guitar behind it. I do like how every acoustic guitarist puts individual little parts into their playing style. Palm muting, for example, which dampens the strings, Ed Sheeran does that quite a lot when he plays. I have got some really bad guitars as well, some half-size nylon-strung guitars that I’ve picked up in charity chops. Actually, on Bonfire Song, which is the title track of our new album, that’s just the sound of me playing one of these cheap guitars in the shed, it has a broken tuning peg on it, it’s really not good as an instrument. There is just something that I really like about it.
Crissie – Is that what it is? I didn’t know you got that sound on a cheap charity shop guitar!
What’s the difference for you between nylon strings, and standard strings?
Ben – It’s about different tunings, to get a different tone and feel. I learned that from Lindsay Rimes, our producer in Nashville, that you should aim to tune the guitar to suit the song. I was listening to Iris by The Goo Goo Dolls, it’s got something like three strings on the guitar all tuned to the same note, and it works really well for that song. Sometimes you just need to experiment, and sometimes a song just needs the sound of a nylon-string guitar. It doesn’t always work, you just have to try it and see.
Do you experiment a lot with tunings Ben?
Ben – I do, I play in DADGAD sometimes, and when we covered Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, I just wasn’t getting the feel that I wanted, so I tuned the bottom string up to E, and it really felt right with Crissie’s vocal on the song.
Some guitarists write on piano, to avoid those comfortable chord sequences you can slip into as a matter of habit. Crissie, maybe as a piano player, you may find that if you took up the guitar?
Crissie – I have tried, and I find the guitar hard to follow, as soon as it goes off against the vocal melody, I find it confusing. I am OK with ballads, but anything with a rhythm on it, on the piano, and it doesn’t work for me.
Ben – I find the piano really easy to play, but when I listen to Crissie play piano, I find it really inspiring, because she leaves lots of spaces in what she plays, and I always try to put too much in.
Crissie – I think a basic knowledge of how chords work helps you as a songwriter, you can work out how things go together to make the flow of a song. Even if it’s only a few notes, you can work out the basics of a melody, and then there is always someone around who can work on it, and do the technical parts to make it a complete song.
Ben – Some amazing songwriters can’t play a guitar at all. I was writing with Wayne Hector who wrote Flying Without Wings, and a lot of the Westlife songs, he’s an amazing songwriter, and he asked to hold my guitar. He just strummed it once, open strings, he can’t play a note! But that’s OK. He hears music in a different way. I come from a classical music family, and in that world it’s very traditional, people say, you can’t play a chord like this, or that. But In Nashville, everyone has their own individual way of playing and no-one cares if it’s supposed to the ‘right’ way, or not, it’s what works for you as a player, or a writer. The way Crissie sings inspires, me, in the true sense of the word, it inspires me to write songs for her to sing.
When you play something like a club or theatre show, or a festival show, do you play out more for the bigger audiences and bigger venues?
Crissie – Well, for the last two-and-a-half years, we have been touring just as a duo, with just an acoustic, and a piano. It was designed to get me back into singing, and performing again after having the twins. It wrecks, your core, so I needed to build my stamina back up again. We planned about twenty shows, and ending up doing something like eighty shows in the end. When we have played with a full band, we have out in-ear monitors, and you can have whatever mix you want to suit you, and it protects your hearing. With just the two of us, we have just had the on-stage fold-back monitors, and we can hear the crowd, and sometimes they call things out, and we can hear them and answer them. Our next tour with be a mixture of the two, and I do like the acoustic shows, because they are more intimate. But with the full band, it’s more energetic, even though we are playing the same songs.
Ben – I think that even though we do love doing the really big shows, where the band starts up, and we walk on and join them, we do still really love the acoustic shows, because it’s so much more a feeling of being in touch and in contact directly with the audience. We play off each other’s vocals, and we love that interaction. There is a story that, if you sing with someone, your heartbeats synchronise. It’s complete rubbish! But when we come off stage, we can look at each other, and without speaking, we just know what kind of show it was, and how each of us is feeling about it. We did a show in Nantwich last year, it’s a small market town in Chesire, and the show was in a small venue., and it was just perfect. There was something about that place that was just magical. I went for a walk before the gig, and I loved the town, I could see myself moving there!
Who is the dream gig, the artist or band you would love to play with?
Ben – We are supporting Garth Brooks on tour shortly, and it will be great to open for him. A dream would be a duet with Dolly Parton. I think, with some artists, they are just so massive, that you forget how really good they are, as writers and performers. Dolly Parton played at Glastonbury, and her stagecraft was just incredible. It would be amazing to look at the crowd. I love being on stage and looking at the crowd, so looking at Dolly’s crowd would be a dream. I think she is one of the best songwriters of all time, she is so clever, her storytelling is just incredible.
Crissie – She has her guitar tuned differently, so she can manage it with her long nails. For me, someone like Faith Hill, or Celine Dion, would be my dream gig. Celine is my holy grail of vocalists. But she would out-sing me, and I’d forget all the words, and just be overawed, and la-la’ing at her.
What next for you?
Crissie – We have an autumn tour in the UK, which we are looking forward to playing, we are doing a gig at the London Palladium, which will be amazing.
Ben – We are doing the Liverpool Philharmonic as well, which will be great. We like venues like that, where we can enjoy the intimacy of the audience contact, that’s what we love so much.
The Shires’ new album, Bonfire, is released on 3 July 2026.
THE SHIRES’ 2026 UK TOUR DATES
26 July – Melbourne Hall, Derby
8 August – The Courtyard, Herefordshire’s Centre For The Arts, Hereford
15 August – Historic Lavenham Theatre, Woodbridge
16 August – St. Nicholas’ Chapel, King’s Lynn
23 August – Stanford Hall Lutterworth
28 August – Stanford Hall, Bottesford
03 November – The Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
05 November – The Glasshouse, Gateshead
06 November – York Barbican, York
08 November – The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
09 November – Symphony Hall, Birmingham
11 November – The London Palladium, London
12 November – Brighton Dome, Brighton
14 November – Ipswich Regent Theatre, Ipswich
15 November – Lighthouse, Poole
16 November – Swansea Building Society Arena, Swansea
18 November – Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
19 November – Bedford Corn Exchange, Bedford
20 November – Bristol Beacon, Bristol
ANDY HUGHES
