Interview: The Cains Bond Personally, Professionally Through Music

If not for a contest, sibling trio the Cains -- Madison, Taylor and Logan Cain -- may never have realized their musical potential.

The threesome first tried their hand at working together musically in 2012, while vying for the prize of opening for singer-songwriter Dave Barnes.

"It took us 20 years of our life to sit down and do that, and even then, it was still just because, ‘Hey, if you win, you get to meet Dave Barnes,'" Logan Cain tells The Boot. "It still, even at that point, wasn’t like, 'This is our in. This is where we’ll start our career.'"

But upon winning the contest and realizing how supportive their fans would be, the three siblings quit their jobs and focused on music full-time.

"We’d always been writing music," Madison Cain admits, "but I don’t think we knew it was possible for us to make money, to pay bills, to do this."

Adds Logan Cain, "It took someone else believing in us for us to believe in ourselves, but sometimes, that's how it goes."

Now, the Cains work and live (along with Madison Cain's husband Jared) together. There isn't room for petty arguments or hurt feelings -- but being siblings, it's an arrangement they know well.

"When we were little, we all shared one bedroom until we were in junior high," Madison Cain explains. "We were home-schooled until middle school, so we were just crammed in there. Now, we get homesick without each other. [I'm] not saying we don’t fight, but I wouldn’t know what it was like to be away from them."

Continues Taylor Cain, "We do fight, definitely, but we’ve kind of learned, let’s make it a minute or less and try to move on."

That doesn't mean it's always easy.

"Our first time in the studio, we had to walk out. We couldn’t watch each other, because we were so insecure. I could be looking through the screen, and I could see Taylor laughing, and she could be laughing about something else, but I would assume she was laughing at me," Madison Cain recalls. "It takes a while to get to the place where, even if they are laughing at you, the more time you’re being upset, the longer the session’s going to take. I think it’s been a growing process."

As they've learned and grown musically, the Cains have also learned and grown personally -- and they've come to discover that their sibling bond works in helpful ways.

"I think it’s taken us this year and a half, two years, of kind, of developing this process. That’s probably one of the biggest things we’ve had to grow into or grow out of, be[ing] willing to say, ‘It’s me,' or, 'It’s probably me,'" Logan Cain admits. "We kind of have a kindred spirit: A lot of times, we’ll sit down and try to pick a new song that we’re going to do, or a new cover video or whatever. We’ll start to play it, and collectively, either we’re feeling it, or we’re not feeling it. A lot of times, we sit down with one song, and it turns into something else that we all three wanted anyway."

As they look forward to the release of a full-length record, the follow-up project to their 2015 EP, the Cains say that they might not release the album in a traditional way.

"As an independent artist, I feel like your recorded music is your business card," notes Logan Cain. "And so, whether or not you can release it and get a lot of streams, a lot of sales -- a lot of that’s out of your control. But if you can make a stellar recorded project that you can hand to anyone without any disclaimer saying, ‘We stand by it. We think it sounds good, and it represents us’ -- if the songs are that good, it speaks for itself."

Adds Taylor Cain, "It would be awesome to start a new trend of just singles all the time: Give out a song a month, instead of a whole album comes out, you hear it, you tour on it."

Not that touring is a problem. As Madison Cain shares, getting to see the world and experience new places in that way is an absolute blessing.

"Before we started doing this, we had barely flown anywhere. We hadn't seen anything," Cain shares. "So we got to go out of the country three times last year, and we’re getting to go back to the U.K. It’s just stuff that I don’t want to take for granted."

She recounts, "I remember, I was sitting at work, and I almost started crying. I always wanted to travel the world, but I started to see, ‘Okay, I get two weeks of vacation a year, which is awesome, and I have money, but how do I get the time? How do you save up enough money? It’s going to be 20 years before I get to see what I want to see.’ This is a blessing."

A list of dates is available on the Cains' website. The Cains EP is available for download on iTunes.