Victor & Penny

Life on the road and inside the music business is unpredictable, filled with successes, surprises and disappointments. Few people understand this more than Erin McGrane and Jeff Freling, who, for the past two years have been touring relentlessly as Victor & Penny.

“The past month has been a really strange balance of good and bad,” McGrane said.

The good: The duo has been enlisted to open for crooner Johnny Boyd, formerly of Indigo Swing, on a seven-show tour of the Northwest and Canada in December. That gig came after McGrane and Freling were hired to fly to Chicago in September and perform on a project Boyd created that’s something akin to “Playboy After Dark.”

“He is working on a pilot for a web series,” McGrane said. “It’s based on Hugh Hefner, sitting around in a swanky apartment, lots of swingers and crooners, the music is fantastic, everyone is beautiful, the cocktails are flowing. He invited us to play. We played two songs live, one take. It was fantastic.”

The tour with Boyd, which will include a performance at a private party at a film director’s house in Hollywood, will be part of a busy end of the year for Victor & Penny, the ukelele/guitar duo that calls its music antique pop, the kind popular in the early 20th century.

They have also been hired to perform at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art on Dec. 13 for the celebration of its “Dressed Up” exhibit. And they will be the emcees of and among the performers at the first New Year’s Eve celebration at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

On top of that, Thursday night the two will perform at the RecordBar, 1020 Westport Road, opening for Pokey LaFarge, who also plays music that sounds like another era.

“We really admire his music,” McGrane said. “He’s not resurrecting dead music. He’s not imitating a kind of music, he’s animating it, giving it his own point of view.”

Amid all that excitement, however, they’ve had to deal with the unexpected resignation of their booking agent and then some bitter disappointment regarding the recording of their next album.

“We can’t get the licensing rights for these songs we’ve been chasing for a year,” McGrane said. “The guy who wrote them just doesn’t want to license them to us. He recorded them 60 years ago. He’s 94 now. He produced it himself and cut his own vinyl but never distributed it. We thought he’d be delighted about what we planned to do. He wasn’t.”

Those songs were the centerpiece of their Escape to Create Artist Residency, a four-week artistic retreat McGrane and Freling took in Florida in February. They came across a recording of the songs via Kansas City filmmaker Tony Ladesich, who has made these songs and the songwriter the focus of a documentary. McGrane and Freling had planned to record versions for their next album.

“Some of the songs are really brilliant,” Freling said. “And one of them really matters. We’ve been performing them live and we made the mistake of saying they’d be on the next record. We talked a lot about it. Now we have to say, ‘Sorry. Those songs aren’t going to be on the record.’”

“It felt like we got sucker punched, artistically clotheslined,” McGrane said. “If there’s any good news it’s that we didn’t book studio time. We were supposed to start recording in New York this month.”

Instead, they have made other big plans. They have signed a lease on an downtown apartment, where they’ll hunker down for the winter. It’ll be the first permanent residence in 18 months for the two, who have been living as guests of friends and relatives when they’re off the road.

By the time this year ends, McGrane said, the two will have been on the road for nearly a full year over the past two years: 160 days in 2012 and more than 200 days this year.

The two have made Victor & Penny their small business. It’s one that started with modest ambitions in late 2010. That’s when McGrane picked up her father’s old ukelele and started learning to play it.

Then she and Freling started writing songs together, posting on YouTube videos of themselves performing those songs while on the road. A brief tour of the West Coast went well, prompting the two to take a big leap of faith in early 2011.

“We sold our personal cars and bought a company car, we moved out of our apartments, and we quit our jobs,” McGrane said.

Freling left his gig as a guitarist with the Blue Man Group in Chicago, and McGrane left hers as an actress in commercials and films.

“We decided if we really wanted to do this, we had to go full time,” she said. “You can’t just tour on the weekends if you want to pay the bills.”

The road life, they both say, is as grueling as it is rewarding and requires an inordinate amount of discipline, organization, commitment, fortitude and faith.

“It has been a fantastic and satisfying experience,” McGrane said. “But it’s less romantic than people think and super-challenging in every way. We have learned so much. We’re better - Kansas City Star

Life on the road and inside the music business is unpredictable, filled with successes, surprises and disappointments. Few people understand this more than Erin McGrane and Jeff Freling, who, for the past two years have been touring relentlessly as Victor & Penny.

“The past month has been a really strange balance of good and bad,” McGrane said.

The good: The duo has been enlisted to open for crooner Johnny Boyd, formerly of Indigo Swing, on a seven-show tour of the Northwest and Canada in December. That gig came after McGrane and Freling were hired to fly to Chicago in September and perform on a project Boyd created that’s something akin to “Playboy After Dark.”

“He is working on a pilot for a web series,” McGrane said. “It’s based on Hugh Hefner, sitting around in a swanky apartment, lots of swingers and crooners, the music is fantastic, everyone is beautiful, the cocktails are flowing. He invited us to play. We played two songs live, one take. It was fantastic.”

The tour with Boyd, which will include a performance at a private party at a film director’s house in Hollywood, will be part of a busy end of the year for Victor & Penny, the ukelele/guitar duo that calls its music antique pop, the kind popular in the early 20th century.

They have also been hired to perform at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art on Dec. 13 for the celebration of its “Dressed Up” exhibit. And they will be the emcees of and among the performers at the first New Year’s Eve celebration at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

On top of that, Thursday night the two will perform at the RecordBar, 1020 Westport Road, opening for Pokey LaFarge, who also plays music that sounds like another era.

“We really admire his music,” McGrane said. “He’s not resurrecting dead music. He’s not imitating a kind of music, he’s animating it, giving it his own point of view.”

Amid all that excitement, however, they’ve had to deal with the unexpected resignation of their booking agent and then some bitter disappointment regarding the recording of their next album.

“We can’t get the licensing rights for these songs we’ve been chasing for a year,” McGrane said. “The guy who wrote them just doesn’t want to license them to us. He recorded them 60 years ago. He’s 94 now. He produced it himself and cut his own vinyl but never distributed it. We thought he’d be delighted about what we planned to do. He wasn’t.”

Those songs were the centerpiece of their Escape to Create Artist Residency, a four-week artistic retreat McGrane and Freling took in Florida in February. They came across a recording of the songs via Kansas City filmmaker Tony Ladesich, who has made these songs and the songwriter the focus of a documentary. McGrane and Freling had planned to record versions for their next album.

“Some of the songs are really brilliant,” Freling said. “And one of them really matters. We’ve been performing them live and we made the mistake of saying they’d be on the next record. We talked a lot about it. Now we have to say, ‘Sorry. Those songs aren’t going to be on the record.’”

“It felt like we got sucker punched, artistically clotheslined,” McGrane said. “If there’s any good news it’s that we didn’t book studio time. We were supposed to start recording in New York this month.”

Instead, they have made other big plans. They have signed a lease on an downtown apartment, where they’ll hunker down for the winter. It’ll be the first permanent residence in 18 months for the two, who have been living as guests of friends and relatives when they’re off the road.

By the time this year ends, McGrane said, the two will have been on the road for nearly a full year over the past two years: 160 days in 2012 and more than 200 days this year.

The two have made Victor & Penny their small business. It’s one that started with modest ambitions in late 2010. That’s when McGrane picked up her father’s old ukelele and started learning to play it.

Then she and Freling started writing songs together, posting on YouTube videos of themselves performing those songs while on the road. A brief tour of the West Coast went well, prompting the two to take a big leap of faith in early 2011.

“We sold our personal cars and bought a company car, we moved out of our apartments, and we quit our jobs,” McGrane said.

Freling left his gig as a guitarist with the Blue Man Group in Chicago, and McGrane left hers as an actress in commercials and films.

“We decided if we really wanted to do this, we had to go full time,” she said. “You can’t just tour on the weekends if you want to pay the bills.”

The road life, they both say, is as grueling as it is rewarding and requires an inordinate amount of discipline, organization, commitment, fortitude and faith.

“It has been a fantastic and satisfying experience,” McGrane said. “But it’s less romantic than people think and super-challenging in every way. We have learned so much. We’re better - Kansas City Star