Days of Rae duo moves to Denver with free music under their belts

In the ongoing battle between the internet and the record industry, the internet has an ally in husband-and-wife duo and recent Denver transplants Days of Rae.

Shon and Cherie Rae Cobbs, offered their last two indie folk albums, 2010’s Quiet Profanity and 2011’s Naked Mache, with a pay-what-you-want (even $0) price tag through Bandcamp. They’re also both available for streaming.

“Everything being on Spotify and stuff, you can listen to everything for free, pretty much. So we’re just going that route, hoping that people will want to listen and think ‘I’ll pay for this,’” Cherie said. “We haven’t ever discussed label stuff. That’s a whole mystery to me. We’re just homegrown people. We wanna make music and put it out and hope people like it.”

Since they’ve only been in Denver for five months, they’re working on building a new audience and taking that free music approach a step further. Rather than pay to record a new album, they’ll use their own equipment to steadily release songs online under the titled “The Social Singles.” The first, “Not A Word,” was released Sunday, and they plan to debut a new track on the 15th of each month.

“Basically, you know, I just keep writing songs all the time, and how many outlets do you have for them?” Cherie said. “Obviously we’re not in it for the money. We just want it to be heard and hear what people think. I’ve been gathering up all these songs in the past year and they’re just sitting there. You can play them live, but you want to get them down.”

As if being new to a big city weren’t enough of a challenge, Shon and Cherie are adjusting to leaving behind their keyboard player and drummer. They moved from Minnesota to Denver because of Shon’s day job doing video engineering for Comcast, but other than coming out for two gigs, the rest of the band hasn’t followed.

“Being new to town, you have zero draw, of course,” Cherie said. “And out in Minnesota we played with two other guys. Obviously they’ve yet to move out here, so Shon and I are playing on our own.”

They haven’t given up hope, though. All four of them will play a gig in Denver together in February, and they’re planning to record together long distance. Keyboardist Ian Carleton and drummer Clint Trotter both have recording studios in their homes, so they’ll work from there and put the files in a drop box. From there, the Cobbs can add their own parts and mix the tracks.

Meanwhile, Days of Rae has tons of gigs coming up in the area. Cherie said she’s a bit nervous to perform live in their “stripped-down” state, and was hoping for short sets, but the duo’s shows will run from 1.5 to three hours.

Welcome to Colorado, Days of Rae.