Parker Barrow
Parker Barrow started with a text message and a white van.
Drummer Dylan Turner had moved to Nashville to put a band together and get on the road fast. About two months in, with East Coast shows booked and tickets sold, his singer quit by text.
“It’s harder than I thought,” Dylan recalled on the most recent episode of the Load Out Music Podcast.
The band was supposed to leave the next day. He messaged a singer he’d met a week or two earlier. He’d never heard her sing.
Megan Kane was new to Nashville, having relocated to Music City from outside Birmingham, Alabama. She said she’d check her schedule.
Really, though, she needed to ask her mom whether she could climb into a stranger’s van and drive 15 hours across the country.
“It wasn’t even a question in my mind of, is this safe,” Megan said. “This is the dream. This is why I moved to Nashville.”
The farthest north she’d ever been was South Carolina.
Two roads through church
Both found music through church. Megan first sang in public at her baptism at age ten, in a family where her aunt sang in worship.
“That’s how I got my soul for it and my spirit for it,” she said.
Dylan grew up in Charles County, Maryland, where his father played music and turned his coffee shop into a 150- to 200-seat venue. Every weekend, he watched bands load in, sound check and settle up. When it closed, he drifted from music until he joined his church’s worship team late in high school, which led him back to drumming and eventually to Nashville.
The rule they had to work around
The first trip was just a weekend. Dylan remembers the sadness when it ended. “I miss this person that I hardly know,” he said.
They took it slowly for a reason. Their bass player at the time, a close friend, had just come out of a band that broke up after the drummer and singer started dating. He told them, without knowing anything, that he’d never be in a band where that happened again. So on the road they were bandmates, and off the road they were whatever they were becoming.
The secret didn’t last. That same bass player started dating the singer in his other band. So they came clean. He later stood in their wedding.
Eight years after that van ride, they’ve been married for three. By Dylan’s count, they’ve spent about ten days apart. “Our marriage comes first, always,” Megan said. “The band is second to that.”
Building the band they pictured
Dylan knew from the start what he wanted, and it wasn’t pop country: a female-fronted Southern rock band with dueling lead guitars and a screaming organ. Getting there took years of hired guns who didn’t always learn the songs.
Things changed when guitarist Alex Bender joined around 2023. On the 2023 debut Jukebox Gypsies, producer Steven McKnight played nearly everything but drums. For Hold the Mash, Dylan and Alex wrote together on the road, trading riffs as ideas hit, which freed McKnight to step back and steer.
The new record adds slide guitar, mandolin and a saloon-style upright piano, with Eric Safka’s organ now at the center of the sound. Eric joined partway through recording. Guitarist Will Tipton arrived near the end, and his first session with the band was their cover of the Black Crowes’ “My Morning Song.” Dylan says you can hear the band grow from the first track they recorded to the last. Kyle Priber, aka “Humpty,” plays bass.
Why Bonnie and Clyde
The band started as a cover act. When they began releasing originals, they wanted a name that told their story. During the COVID lockdown they’d binged The Highwaymen and a stack of Bonnie and Clyde documentaries. Dylan’s dad suggested Parker Barrow as a joke. It stuck.
Asked why they’d name a band after murderers, Dylan says they didn’t. They named it after two people who did everything together and never stopped moving.
“We’re not necessarily running from something like the law,” he said. “We’re more so running to something like our dreams.”