In an interview five-plus years ago, Leigh Nash was asked if she would ever consider joining another band, and if so, under what conditions. “I doubt it,” said the Sixpence None the Richer frontwoman. “Unless it was a band with Matt Slocum.”
“I’m glad that I said that, because it’s definitely true that I wouldn’t do this with anyone else,” said Nash, who has regrouped with guitarist/cellist/songwriter Slocum (who joined Nash for the interview) and the rest of the original Sixpence None the Richer lineup. “I’ve always missed the band and wish that we could have kept doing it all these years. But realistically, we both had families, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out. But I’ve always hoped that this would come to pass and believed that it was meant to be.”
Family obligations notwithstanding, Sixpence None the Richer’s band members never left music behind. “We’re all lifers,” said Slocum, who played with a number of groups while Nash pursued her solo career during the group’s 12-year hiatus. Sixpence None the Richer is on the road again and slated to bring their Christmas show to the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts on Friday, Dec. 12. The group will likely pull from their timeless hits like “Kiss Me,” their 2024 album “Rosemary Hill,” and their 2008 Christmas album, “The Dawn of Grace” for the special event.
“The break gave me a chance to spread my wings as a writer and just gain confidence in some other areas that I maybe lacked,” said Nash, who recently released a duet single with Tears For Fears’ Roland Orzabal. “But I missed Matt, who’s always been a central part of my life, like a brother, now more than ever.”
As fate would have it, the two longtime bandmates got back together, but not with Sixpence None the Richer. Instead, Nash and Slocum became touring members of 10,000 Maniacs, the alternative rock band they’d opened for back in the late ‘90, when Sixpence’s breakthrough “Kiss Me” single was just beginning to take off.
“It felt like they were family,” Slocum said of the 10,000 Maniacs tour. “And we just realized how much fun we had on the road together, and how much we enjoyed doing what we do and that we’re good at it. And so, for Leigh and I, it was a bonding experience, and it did help fuel the fire to come back off that tour and really hit it full force.”
In 2023, Nash and Slocum were back in the studio recording with their Sixpence None the Richer bandmates. The result was “Rosemary Hill,” (which dropped Oct. 2024 through Flatiron Recordings), a six-song EP that checks all the right boxes when it comes to the central Texas alt-pop group’s strong points.
While more than a few band reunions have turned out to be major disappointments, the Sixpence EP lives up to the high standards the group has maintained throughout its career. If “Kiss Me” bore, as many critics claimed, a distinct resemblance to the music of The Sundays, a number of the songs on “Rosemary Hill” show a more pronounced Smiths influence.
“I think for this project, it was fun to explore guitar-based music with that Johnny Marr style of sonic textures and to write songs in that vein,” Slocum said of The Smiths guitarist. “He didn’t do your traditional style of guitar soloing. It was more like creating a guitar orchestra in a way. And while guitar music doesn’t rule the universe anymore, maybe it’ll make a comeback.”
Sixpence None the Richer — like Amy Grant and U2 frontman Bono before them — are Christian musicians who found runaway success in secular pop music. The group, which is currently on a tour featuring Christmas songs, had already released two Dove Award-winning albums before the 1998 release of “Kiss Me,” a sugary pop confection that put them on the charts in a big way.
Buoyed by placements in “Dawson’s Creek,” “She’s All That” and the BBC broadcast of Prince Charles’ wedding, the song slowly worked its way up to No. 1 on the “Billboard” magazine charts, earned two Grammy nominations, and went on to sell more than three million copies. It was also the first song that Taylor Swift learned to play on guitar.
For those who only know the group for “Kiss Me” or their chart-friendly cover of Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” “Rosemary Hill” is an opportunity to hear another side of the band that goes considerably deeper than their pop hits.
The song “We Are Love” is a case in point, a darkly atmospheric track with lyrics to match. There’s a considerable distance between lyrics like “Kiss me beneath the milky twilight / Lead me out on the moonlit floor” and “Red barn in the night, wet with kerosene / Match in your hand, I won’t intervene.”
The track isn’t the first time that Slocum, who wrote both “Kiss Me” and “We Are Love,” has ventured into the lyrical dark side. After all, this is the same musician who, on the band’s self-titled breakthrough album, opened a song with the line “This is my 45th depressing tune / They’re looking for money, as they clean my artistic womb.”
“What really fascinates me is when you kind of pull things out of mid-air that may not make a whole lot of sense to you, but they have kind of a visceral impact,” Slocum said. “‘We Are Love’ is a good example of that. Those lyrics are on the darker side, but I think the song is a contrast between dark and light. And then people sort of took it as a declaration of unity like, you know, a “love not hate” kind of thing. So it’s like your listeners end up helping you discover the meaning of the lyric.”
“Kiss Me,” by contrast, offers little in the way of ambiguity. “It was so flowery and verbose that it didn’t leave as much room for that,” Slocum said. “So if there’s any change in approach, it’s maybe just leaving space for things to kind of take hold with the people that end up listening to it.”
As for the future, Nash and Slocum plan on making “Rosemary Hill” more than just a one-off project.
“I hope that we’ll continue to connect with people through our new music and not just the old stuff,” said Slocum. “Well, that’s our intention, anyway. I mean, obviously, I think that’s what all bands want. But we started really early — there’s a lot of music that came out before the hits — and we’re still committed to writing new music and doing it well.”