North Carolina musicians Austin and Sarah McCombie — known as Chatham Rabbits — have always been an enterprising duo. In 2019, the pair left their more traditional jobs in a commitment to a career as full-time musicians. Four albums later, their most recent being 2025's "Be Real With Me," Chatham Rabbits have added yet another work to their impressive creative output. Based on the song "Abigail" from their 2022 album, "If You See Me Riding By," Chatham Rabbits have released a children's book, Abigail and the Journey of a Pack Horse Librarian, that delves further into the true story that inspired the song.

On a recent visit to Minnesota to promote the new book, Sarah and Austin McCombie visited The Current at Minnesota Public Radio to chat with Radio Heartland host/producer Mike Pengra about what they've been up to, including the new book, expanding their sound and instrumentation, and what might be next for the Americana duo.

Watch the full interview above, and read a transcript below.

Interview Transcript

Mike Pengra: I am so excited to be in the studio with Chatham Rabbits. I'm with Sarah and Austin McCombie. I've been playing your music for years, and we're going to talk about your fourth album, which just came out, which is called Be Real With Me. First of all, welcome to Minnesota.

Austin McCombie: Thank you. We're stoked to be here.

Sarah McCombie: Our first time in the Twin Cities.

Austin McCombie: It's a little cold and rainy, but that's OK.

Mike Pengra: We're used to that here.

Austin McCombie: Yeah, it's no big deal for y'all.

Mike Pengra: Yeah. From reading your bio, I'm assuming that music wasn't — you weren't going to be musicians. You just, it was something that came on later, and now you're full-time musicians. So how did you make that transition? First of all, how did you become musicians, and how did you make that transition to being full-time touring artists?

Sarah McCombie: Yeah.

Austin McCombie: We completely cut bait with our corporate jobs. That's how.

Sarah McCombie: Yeah.

Mike Pengra: Which were what?

Sarah McCombie: Well, I was not exactly corporate, but I still had to set an alarm and, like, look presentable every day. I was a music teacher at a Montessori school doing K through 8 education, and Austin was a financial planner, so he did have the corporate cubicle desk job and clients and conferences and, like, all the things, but we were just remarking last night, actually, that we have now been playing music for twice as long as we had our other jobs, which is something we never thought that we would be able to say. And we just feel really lucky that we get to do this. Because, yeah, before, in our past life, music was our hobby.

Mike Pengra: Yeah.

Sarah McCombie: And we somehow have turned our hobby into a job, which has its own downfall, because, you know, now I'm like, "Oh, playing the banjo doesn't exactly sound, like, soothing anymore," but it's been so rewarding, and, like, we just never could have dreamed the places that music has taken us. It's been really great.

Austin McCombie: And I think to answer your question, too, like, it was a definitive cutoff date for us; we decided to do it. Sarah finished her school year, I quit my job and we were left with nothing else to do except for give this a try.

Sarah McCombie: And we already had the, I think, the experience of having job jobs was very helpful to us. We were used to getting up and like getting to work, and we treated booking shows and creating music like a nine to five, and I think that that really helped us out, just having a lot of structure and, like, gumption in the beginning, and it sustained us for sure.

Mike Pengra: Are you guys from North Carolina originally?

Austin McCombie: Both of us are, yeah, different parts. But...

Mike Pengra: How did you meet?

Sarah McCombie: Oh, well, that's also funny that you asked that, because we, you know, before we started rolling, we were talking about Watchhouse, formerly Mandolin Orange. I used to be in an old-time band that, back in 2013, my old-time band went on tour with Watchhouse. We were the opening act for one of their album-release tours. And so Austin was a Mandolin Orange / Watchhouse fan, and—

Austin McCombie: I was in the crowd.

Sarah McCombie: In the audience!

Austin McCombie: I had no idea about her band or who she was. And you know, you see the girl on the banjo, and you hope one day you get to talk to her. About a year later, I finally did. So we met through music.

Sarah McCombie: Yeah, yeah. It's very crazy.

Mike Pengra: I'm in the studio with Chatham Rabbits, and we're talking about their career and their new album, Be Real with Me, which came out about a year ago now, album number four. It seems to me, over the the other albums I've heard, this is a little bit of a growth in your sound. It's a little bit — there's some songs that kind of go a little bit more towards the poppy sound, and some that are folky. And how do, how do these songs develop?

Austin McCombie: That's a really good question. I was able to co produce this record, which was really, really fun. It took a long time to, like, feel like I wasn't having major imposter syndrome, you know, going into the studio and making some more decisions. And I co-produced it with our producer that worked on a lot of our previous records, Saman Khoujinian is his name, and I think we, you know, we had been in the studio, we had live tracked a lot of stuff before with a band, and that's really special, but you are limited to the band's performance in a lot of ways. And we had always kind of had a bluegrass band, and this record, we kind of tracked from the ground up, and we threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall, and a lot of things didn't stick. And, you know, we kind of went back and forth, and really just had the total freedom of time. We worked on the record for at least, was it like almost two years?

Sarah McCombie: Yeah, almost two years, yeah.

Austin McCombie: We recorded "Facing 29" first, and that was, that feels like a long time ago now, and just took our time with it. And I think that the evolution and sound came from us growing over those two years and doing things that were a lot of outside of our comfort zone. And just being like, you know what? We are not defined by being a bluegrass band, and Americana is such a broad umbrella, and we can really, like, just try all these things and see how we feel about them as artists. And it was a really fun process.

Sarah McCombie: I think making a record full of songs that you actually like to listen to yourself is, that was really rewarding. Like, I love this record. I listen to it like it's not even me, like it's—

Austin McCombie: She wears our own merch, too!

Mike Pengra: So you liked it more so than your past records, obviously.

Sarah McCombie: Yes. Oh, this is hands down my favorite. Like, I cringe sometimes at older songs. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. I cannot hear this."

Austin McCombie: Every artist does that.

Sarah McCombie: But this record, I am just like, "It is so good."

Austin McCombie: Even after a year, you're still saying that?

Sarah McCombie: Even, yeah, I love it.

Austin McCombie: I'm not saying that as much, for the record.

Sarah McCombie: I don't care. I don't — like, I love it.

Austin McCombie: It's also been fun having more flexibility with the live show. Because of this record being less genre specific, we've also been able to evolve the live show and have different band members. We just had a saxophone player for the first time, I guess, last week at a big North Carolina show, and it was fun because, like, these songs are more flexible, and so it doesn't matter if there's a mandolin and a fiddle and, you know, all the things that we're used to. And so we're trying to kind of keep that trend going of just trying new things, you know?

Mike Pengra: Yeah, like the first song on the record, "Gas Money," it's a little bit more of a different sound for you guys.

Austin McCombie: Definitely.

Mike Pengra: It's some growth.

Sarah McCombie: Totally. And that's one of the ones I rock out to in the car.

Mike Pengra: Why?

Sarah McCombie: Why. Have you heard the term like, being, like, "main charactering," like, when you, like, are just you get into this...

Austin McCombie: You're feeling it.

Sarah McCombie: You're feeling it, and you, like, become the main character in the movie. Like, you're, like, you're Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada. Or like, Lizzie McGuire in The Lizzie McGuire Movie, like, that's, that's how I feel when I ...

Mike Pengra: How about Han Solo, maybe?

Sarah McCombie: Yeah, OK, exactly. You pick your character, you become that thing, and you're just, like, you're vibing and that's how that song is, just like, really fun. And I get to like, play somebody else when I am rocking out to it.

Mike Pengra: Another one that I really liked is "Collateral Damage": "I want my freedom. I want a baby. I want it all. I want it fast. I want my youth, and I love to last." A baby?

Sarah McCombie: Yeah.

Austin McCombie: Oh boy.

Sarah McCombie: Oh yeah, I know, buckle up. Yeah.

Mike Pengra: Drum roll here.

Sarah McCombie: Right! This is kind of where I get on my little bit of a soapbox. But I am very interested and frustrated by the notion that, you know, I'm 33 now, and at age 35, it's considered to be advanced maternal age, a geriatric pregnancy. But 35 years old is also the age at which you are allowed to run for President of the United States. So the exact moment that women's fertility is peaking and then going down is the exact moment that they are, like, legally open to all these other opportunities and like, employment and things within, you know, their ability to make a living, and the fact that we also, we have that biology component, we have the same time, we have political factors at play. We have so many things that are like very, very, very personal choices that get complicated by all these exterior factors. Is just something that I feel really passionately about, and as it pertains to our life and music, you know, we love what we do for a living, but I also have always wanted to be a mom and trying to figure out how those two things work together in a country where healthcare is like very precarious. Just being a touring musician traveling from state to state and laws about how you are treated at a hospital as a woman changes just by the state lines and things like that. I was just trying to get all of those emotions out in this song, and talk about when you want two things that are in opposition to one another, and you want them at the same time.

Mike Pengra: Right. At the time this interview is being recorded, you guys are in the Twin Cities for a convention of librarians, because there's a book, it involves a character that you created. Tell me about the book, Abigail.

Sarah McCombie: Yeah. So we are here now for the Public Librarians Association Conference. It meets every year, and this is, happens to be Minneapolis' year to host 7,800 librarians and lots of people within the book industry. And yes, we have written a children's book called Abigail, based at our song called "Abigail." Abigail is actually the horse in the song, and her rider is a unnamed character kind of, kind of riffing on my own personality.

Mike Pengra: I was going to say, is her name Sarah, maybe?

Sarah McCombie: Probably! Yeah, probably! But it's the story of the women who were pack horse librarians during the Great Depression. So during the Great Depression, when FDR created the New Deal, one of the programs under that was the Pack Horse Library Project, and it was a program where women in Kentucky were paid by the federal government to ride their horses and mules into the mountains and deliver library books on horseback. They had to supply their own horses and mules, collect all the library books themselves within their communities, and station, like, holding centers for the books in sheds, in churches, in barns. They made do with what they had.

And I've just been so inspired by this story of resilience and these women, and I also am obsessed with both reading and horses, so I wrote this song, and then had the idea from Austin for the children's book, and we worked with our longtime collaborator and friend. Her name is Kelley Wills. She is a illustrator out of Eugene, Oregon, and she painted these beautiful paintings for the children's book section of the book, and then I wrote the second half, which is an educators guide so parents and babysitters and cool aunts and uncles and teachers and librarians can sit down with their kids and read the book and have tons of conversations that are sparked by prompts and images in the book.

Austin McCombie: Sarah was home schooled, so she was perfect for the job the educators' guide.

Mike Pengra: I heard that recently, you guys moved so you could be closer to your family. Is that correct?

Sarah McCombie: Yeah, well, I think that was kind of like a byproduct of of it.

Austin McCombie: We've always been close to Sarah's family.

Sarah McCombie: Yeah, we've always lived somewhat, like, closer to my side of the family, which has been really lovely. But a couple of years ago, my paternal grandfather passed away, and right before he passed, we were able to buy the family farm, and that was huge for us, and we have been slowly restoring it. The home place on the property was built in 1753, and the grounds are just spectacular, and we've converted a cattle barn into an open-air music venue. So we host concerts.

Mike Pengra: Wow!

Sarah McCombie: Yeah, it's really cool. We host concerts, and we do a kids summer camp and a Patreon campout for our patrons.

Austin McCombie: The only downside is we're no longer technically in Chatham County. We're one county over.

Sarah McCombie: Yeah.

Mike Pengra: Do you have to change your name then?

Austin McCombie: "Guilford Rabbits" doesn't have the same...

Sarah McCombie: It does not have a good ring. But it's been really fun to get to, like, assume the role of groundskeepers and farmers.

Austin McCombie: We don't really feel like it's ours, even though we bought it. We feel like it's just been in the family for so long. We're just stewarding it for now.

Sarah McCombie: Yeah, there you go.

Mike Pengra: I'm in the studio with the Chatham Rabbits. They are Sarah and Austin McCombie. Album number four is out now. It's been a year. What's next? More music, family? You bought the farm.

Sarah McCombie: Yeah, a lot is going on. We are writing new material right now for album number five, and that is very exciting. It's just cool to see, like, what themes pop up naturally as you get older. Like, we continue to write more and more about ourselves and less about like, other stories. I think we're like, yeah, like, less of imposter syndrome and more curiosity about ourselves and trying to dig into what makes us who we are. So we're working on that. And then, yeah, this children's book is going to be a huge part of what we're going to do moving forwards; you know, getting this children's book into independent bookstores, and also doing library programming, school programming, and just, yeah, using it as a whole other aspect of Chatham Rabbits.

Mike Pengra: The book is called Abigail. The most recent album is called Be Real with Me. These guys are the Chatham Rabbits. You guys, I'm a big fan. Thank you for coming in. It's been a real pleasure to meet you.

Sarah McCombie: Thank you so much for having us.

Austin McCombie: Hopefully we can come back and play at some point.

Mike Pengra: Let's set a date.

Austin McCombie: Yeah. Awesome.

Credits

Guests – Chatham Rabbits (Austin and Sarah McCombie)
Host / Producer – Mike Pengra
Video – Luke Taylor
Audio – Maurizio D'Errico

External Link

Chatham Rabbits – official site