Booted up, ready to go

Dover musicians Nik and Sam are finetuning their Warner Music album

— DOVER - When 17-year-old Sam Setian dyed her hair black as a way to go an inky incognito from her twin sister, Nik, younger by a very crucial 22 minutes - not least of all to their mother, Rhonda, who by the tenth in-between minute had begun to question her natural-childbirth decision - the stakes were a little higher than with most acts of one sister un-twinning herself.

Sort of like the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana split-personality if the scenario were crossed with the Doublemint twins. Nik and Sam, as the sisters are known professionally, are in one iteration hometown girls known to jump in their Land Rover and make quick trips into town from the 15-acre horse- and dog-roamed Setian homestead tucked down an unmarked gravel road in Dover.

But, like the girl in the Hannah Montana side of the mirror, they also happen to be, thanks to a long-gestating contract with Warner Music that looks likely to finally yield a polished radio-friendly country album within the next year, secretly famous, or at least secretly about-to-be-famous.

Hence the hair-color change: While Nik retains the pair's natural eternal-spring break blond highlights, Sam has gone emo dark, a pre-emptive strike against pigeonholing as twins first and artists second.

"We wanted people to focus on our musicianship and stuff," Sam says. "Before the twin thing - the novelty thing - that should be the last thing they notice. That should be No. 10."

The pair are poised to join American Idol's Kris Allen as the next Arkansans likely to gain traction in American mainstream pop culture.

Trips back and forth to Nashville and Los Angeles find them debating with their record label which song should be their first radio single: rock-influenced track "Empty," which Nik and Sam debuted this past weekend at the Yell County Yellfest and will repeat when they play Riverfest at 4:30 p.m. May 23 on the main amphitheater stage, or perhaps "Stupid Games," a Mean Girls-ish account of the gossipy high-school drama that, along with their increasingly hectic schedules, instigated the Setians' decision to pull the twins out of public school and educate them at home. When the two played the song for Billy Ray Cyrus during one of their Los Angeles visits, he mentioned that it might be the kind of thing his daughter Miley - yes, that Miley, the two-twins-in-one-Hannah-Montana-package, 'tween-starlet rivalry-starting Miley- would like to record.

Until that gets settled and as Nik and Sam attempt to distance themselves from the 10th most interesting thing about them - that, underneath the salon coloring, they are carbon copies who finish each other's sentences and asked for a shared car for their birthday - here are things 1 through 9:1.Instrumentation. The twins fi rst met Chris Lee, an Arkansas native and now Los Angeles-based music producer who would mentor them, at the age of 12 when they played for him at a community picnic for which he had flown in specifically to hear them. The Warner Music contract followed two years later. The delay in releasing an album can be attributed in part, their mother hints, to the girls' perfectionism. Recording sessions find each sister performing her own instrumentation - banjo, dobro, mandolin, guitar - before they lay down vocals. The girls' mother is a registered nurse; their father, Richard, is a firefighter by day and amateur musician by night. Richard Setian's fluency with the instruments of bluegrass music inspired Sam to learn the banjo at age 10, and Nik soon followed on guitar in order to accompany her sister.

Presenting themselves as bluegrass players who have men's names can create expectations that fashion-forward teenage girls don't always fulfill. "Some people have thought we were going to turn out to be 80-year-old men," Sam says with a laugh. "When we played Toad Suck they were looking for two guys. They'd thought we'd have, like, two folding chairs onstage with a banjo and a fiddle."

They did in fact have a banjo, and Sam's tastes are only getting more expensive as the focus on the girls' musicianship becomes more pronounced.

"Her first banjo cost $100 because we didn't know where she was going with it," says Rhonda Setian. "The second one was $1,600. Now, she wants an electric banjo. That costs like $5,000. The label told her she could get it when the album comes out."

From her corner of the family's couch, Sam crinkles her nose at the unfairness of it all.

2.Songwriting. As a preteen duo playing the Yell County picnic-and festival circuit, Nik and Sam performed mostly covers of bluegrass standards like "Little Maggie," "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and "Rocky Top." These days, either on their own at home or teamed with songwriting coaches in Nashville, they generate their own material.

"Down Home," the Nik and Sam song that boots up during a visit to the sisters' MySpace page (accessible, along with its Facebook companion, through their official site nikandsam. com) is a good-humored anthem to the simple life, but it's also sophisticated enough to pull off an antagonistic dig with the sort of insiderish specificity more common to hip-hop than country: dissing a boy who has grown too big for the "brand new jeans from a magazine" that leave him "looking all New York City," Nik, who sings lead vocals,winningly delivers the chop that cuts him down to size: "I know your mom - she's on the 4-H Committee."

"I'm just going to say this, and I probably shouldn't," Rhonda says to her daughters. "The things like you all getting your feelings hurt at school - the girl drama and all that stuff - you've written a ton of songs off that. Just from when you were 12 when you started, the stuff you're writing now is way more intense."3.Style. No matter how actively the sisters try to resist marketing gimmicks, their consideration among the new wave of girls with guitars seems inevitable. Their youth, in combination with the flowing hair that grazes the necks of their instruments, guarantees that their every move will be parsed with a Taylor Swiftian-level of scrutiny. Just as fans once scrambled to figure out which hometown boy inspired the now 19-year old Swift to write her hit "Teardrops on My Guitar," the twins are resigned to the idea that if, for example, "Stupid Games" does make it onto their record,some Internet gumshoe detectives might come digging for some Dover dirt.

"Those girls will know exactly who that song's about," Rhonda says.

"Even if they don't admit to it," Nik adds.

4.Harmony. Until the age of 2, the sisters spoke only to each other and only in what their mother called their "twin-talk." The harmonizing continued once they began singing. Richard once told Radio Disney that, even at a young age, when one twin was singing off-key, she'd get a disapproving look from the other one.

5.Symmetry. OK, so it seems like an extension of the twin thing, which nobody's supposed to notice this high up on the list, but Nik and Sam wouldn't necessarily have to be twins to finish each other's sentences or start the same sentence at the same time, which they often do.

"Actually!" they declare in unison, both preparing to begin her own version of how they came to own the navy-blue Land Rover sitting out in their circular drive. They dissolve into giggles before either can finish the story, which involves competing with potential car buyers who'd come from as far as Little Rock to inspect the vehicle.

The sisters are beginning to absorb the notion that, with touring on the horizon, they'll be yoked together far longer than most siblings.

"If we're all on a bus someday, we may have to stop and get out and walk around," their mother says of potential discord.

But the sisters understand the stakes of saying things you can't take back. "I can't afford losing my sister over a fight," Sam says.

6.Plan B. There was a time when Rhonda Setian thought the boots her twin girls insisted on wearing would serve a utilitarian purpose rather than adding country twang underneath a stage-friendly cocktail dress.

From the age of 7, Nik and Sam competed in barrel racing and pole bending events.

"That's what I thought we'd be doing now - high school rodeo," Rhonda says.

In one of their photographs from those days, the girls look identical underneath their 10-gallon hats, except for a limegreen cast one sister is wearing on her arm, the result of a fractured wrist. If the picture had been taken a year later, it'd be a cast binding the same type of fracture, suffered in the same type of fall, on the same arm of the other sister.

"Must be a twin thing," muses Richard, who hasn't gotten the twin-thing memo: It's too early to be talking about that.

7.Performing pedigree. Nik and Sam returned from one of their recent California trips gushing with music-industry frame-of-reference points that would be lost on most 17-year-olds. They'd recorded in Shangri-La, the fabled Malibu beach house-turned studio famously equipped to meet the specifications of Bob Dylan when he was recording with The Band.

"You're in the backyard, sitting there with this view of the beach, and Bob Dylan's tour bus is out there," Sam begins.

"You just get this feeling," Nik adds, her eyes going wide.

8.Boots. Of course, there are boots.

"Oh my gosh, it's not even funny," Nik says.

"I have a brown pair, a black pair, a pink pair," Sam says. "Red boots, aqua boots - those are so cool. Tall, short - they come in different shapes and sizes. Riding boots, moccasins. We have a bunch of different boots. Every type of boot. If you have an orange dress on, you don't want a pair of red boots, you know?"

When the sisters express their ambivalence about the results of a recent L.A. photo shoot, their displeasure seems to settle around ankle height: The stylist had outfitted them in high-heeled shoes instead of boots.

But there are exceptions: Both girls recently attended the Russellville High School prom. They wore high-top Converse sneakers with their dresses.

9.Ambition. Three years ago, post-recording contract but before they'd followed Metallica and the ascendant pop-punk band The Gossip - also fronted by an Arkansan singer/songwriter, Kensett native Beth Ditto - into the Shangri-La studios, Nik and Sam told a Radio Disney interviewer that their dreams were to play the Grand Ole Opry and Alltel Arena, not necessarily in that order.

Now, they're thinking in a calculated way about who their label will likely pair them with on a tour. Rascal Flatts, perhaps?

"We're ready to rock 'n' roll," Sam says.

Meanwhile, mom keeps things in perspective.

"I don't think people understand what they do," she says. "It's full-time, nonstop. All I wish for is them to do what they really want to do. Who cares if they have a big hit? You can't have a big hit for the rest of your life."

Family, Pages 29, 36 on 05/13/2009

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