"The Goal Is To Make Sure You're Growing Together and Not Growing Apart" The War And Treaty Open Up On Life, Love and The Need For New Album Plus One

For Michael and Tanya Trotter of The War And Treaty, music happens just as life does.

A song often unfolds with the stirring of dinner or the washing of a dish. That’s, at least, how several of the offerings on their new album, Plus One, came to be, with the husband-and-wife duo being just that: husband and wife.

“Nine times out of ten, if we're writing, I'm cleaning up,” Tanya tells Holler of their creative process. “I'm doing something busy, and Michael is playing the song. He's like, ‘Listen to this,’ and ‘What do you think?’ and I'm interjecting.”

As they’ve steadily risen in the Nashville ranks, this is something they have perfected, this exercise in both marriage and stardom, the two of them working toward the shared goal of chasing a dream and making a life. The process seems rarely glamorous, but the product is always real.

What resulted this time around was Plus One, an unguarded glimpse into this partnership as it has never been perceived before. Across 18 tracks, listeners get to experience the love that Michael and Tanya not only have for each other and for those around them, but also the love that they wish to see in the world today.

“Me and Tanya, we purposely decided we were going to open up the doors to our lives and really let people in for the purpose of saying, ‘See, you're not alone. You're not by yourself,’” Michael shares.

From the beginning, they sensed a need for Plus One. There’s a need for songs that wrap us in the everyday tenderness of marriage, hold us in the necessary pain of heartache and walk with us through the beautiful unease of simply allowing ourselves to be. Each offering is representative of lessons the couple have learned throughout their lives, either as partners or from time spent apart.

The desirous ‘Save Me’, for instance, speaks to the need for some kind of shelter in the storm. “I can see myself crawling to Tanya on days where I'm struggling with PTSD and I just want to touch her jogging pant, or just touch her hand,” Michael says of the song’s inspiration. “I don't even need all of her time, I just need some of her energy. I know that [she is] the one I need to save my life and to save me for that moment.”

While the banjo-peppered ‘Teardrops in the Rain’ and string-fueled ‘Reminisce’ are a pair of the album’s desperately achey breakup ballads, they touch on the importance of such endings and the wisdom that can only come from walking away.

Of the latter track, Michael shares, “I wrote that song literally because I learned how to love my exes properly. You know, I learned how to not be bitter. I learned how to move on in a healthy way. And I learned that from my wife, Tanya. I watched her and her – for lack of a better term – baby daddy. I watched them operate in love, raising our [son,] Tony.”

Being that open and vulnerable during the creation of Plus One, however, did not come without its moments of fear. “The first scary moment for me in the album is a song called ‘Skyscraper’,” Michael recalls. “I talk about something that's very personal, which is my weight.”

Against the explosive and soulful pop-rock arrangement, he sings: “You said ‘I’ll never be nothin’’/ Nah, you said ‘I ain’t got what it takes’ / ‘Just a fat man with a fat chance’ / But I don’t mind eatin’ my piece of cake / I know I’ve got a lot to prove, so baby this one’s for you / Oh, I know I’ve got to lose some weight, so I’m starting with you…”

With the song, the pair shrug off naysayers and negativity in order to lay a foundation of self-love and self-acceptance. As Michael explains, “I've learned that I can help someone, even if it's not teaching them a lesson, but even if it's just saying, ‘Hey, I think like this. Do you think like this? Do you feel like this? You see, you're not alone. I told you, you're not alone and we can do something about it together.’ You know, we're all beautiful, and we're all unique, and all of us are skyscrapers.”

In this way, Plus One is more than just an album of love songs arriving on the most obvious day of the year – Valentine’s Day – it’s a collection of human songs, proving that love, whether it be for someone else or just for ourselves, comes in many different forms. The War and Treaty have boldly invited us in to share in whatever that may be.

“We've grown with the fans over the last couple of years, and we just wanted to let them know that we see them,” Tanya offers, adding how difficult it can be for bystanders to relate two people in love. “We want them to know that we can relate, because we haven't always been together and we've had relationships before … I just felt like it was important for us to touch all the different aspects of what a relationship is.”

Just as it leaps from gospel to bluegrass, pop-infused country to soul-fired rock, the album sweeps between the sensual and the steady, the passionate and the practical, placing love itself on a spectrum and casting Michael and Tanya’s own relationship in a very nuanced light.

“You can't eat steak every day,” Tanya admits. “Everything can’t always be lovey-dovey. There are days when love is just sitting on the couch or love is you talking or love is you just around each other. I think that it does take on different forms all the time, and it's always changing. The goal is to make sure you're growing together and not growing apart.”

It’s those words of wisdom that are steeped into Plus One. Just as each song offers listeners valuable fragments of truth they can take away, Michael and Tanya have come away from this album with their own slice of clarity, this new chapter officially affirming their place in Music City.

“We didn't come to Nashville to do country music,” Tanya shares. “We came to Nashville to do music, and Nashville embraced us and accepted us … This record, out of all the records we've done, is the body of work that says, ‘Here's home.’”

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The War And Treaty's fourth studio album, Plus One, is released Friday, February 14, 2025 via Merucry Nashville.

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