The War and Treaty will perform at Salina’s Stiefel Theatre on Friday, April 10.
Embraced widely by the country and Americana music communities, the husband and wife duo of Tanya and Michael Trotter, Jr. offer a rich and seamless blend of soul, gospel, and blues that reminds listeners how important each of those genres has been to the development of American music.
Emerging from Albion, Michigan, the duo has been releasing music for the last decade, earning critical accolades as well as multiple Grammy and CMT Awards nominations while also taking home several Americana Music Honors and Awards trophies.
Peers who have invited the group to collaborate range from Brothers Osborne, Bon Jovi and Zach Bryan, demonstrating the wide appreciation for and appeal of The War and Treaty.
The Trotters recently spoke with KMUW about their career to this point and their approach to live performances.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You released the album “Plus One” in 2025. That had a lot of music on and I wonder how much of that material you’ve been able to work into the live shows since then and what the reaction has been.
Tanya Trotter: It’s interesting. We don’t really format our shows off of our albums. We go with the audience, what they feel. We’re always working on new music so we’re always trying new things. We have some staples that fans love but for the most part we haven’t stuck to a formula for our live shows. You never know what you’re going to get. [Laughs.]
Michael Trotter: I’ve been chastised about this from my wife though. She’s been very kind and nice. This has actually been my fault and my wife has said that this has been a mistake of ours. We’ll see. On this tour, we’ve got a mixture.
TT: He has not missed when it comes to setlists. On the last run, I said, “These are the songs that fans want to hear.” It didn’t go quite as well as when [he wrote the setlist]. [Laughs.]
MT: From her mouth! Not mine!
TT: It’s easy for me to stay in my lane. Setlists aren’t my thing! [Laughs.]
But I really love that. I’m not one of those people who goes to a show and says, “Ah, they didn’t play what I wanted to hear.” I’m very much of the mind that it’s cool if the artist picks what they’re going to play. It’s a reflection of where they’re at.
TT: We love you for that.
MT: Most people, I think, have their own thing. For this band, from the moment that we get into the city, [to the time that] we get into the building, if you’re open to it, there’s a spirit that flows and is able to tell you where you should be that evening. The people are just a manifestation of whatever you spirit if feeling. That’s the way I operate.
We’ve been very fortunate: We haven’t had a live show that’s been built off covers either. We’ve done a lot of quotes of some artists who we are very fond of such as Ike and Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, but we take all of that spirit and we go forward in what we do. It’s been a beautiful blessing.
When did you know that the two of you were onto something, that there would be an audience for what you were doing?
MT: Our hometown of Albion, Michigan. It all began there for us. We were going to this neighborhood theater called The Bohm. We saw our neighborhood react to our band differently than they were reacting to other bands that would flow through. That’s when we realized, “This is interesting.” We were studying the late, great genius of Ray Charles and we fell in love with Margie Hendrix from The Raelettes. Tanya and I had this idea: What if we took Margie from out of the background and put her right next to Ray? That would be The War and Treaty.
I thought people would really love that and we would take it on the road and we would get glimpses through our live show. When we played Bonnaroo [in 2018]. We got a five-minute ovation after this particular song that we did. It was just on and on. People were really feeling it in the spirit. That’s when me and Tanya high-fived and said, “I think we’ve got something here if we stay true to form.”
And the rest is history.
I saw you open for Brandi Carlile and Jason Isbell in 2019. It seems to me that that was this period of time when I’d gone from hear a little bit about you to all of a sudden being very aware of you, like you’d gone from not being there to suddenly being everywhere. Was that how it felt for you?
TT: Yes and no. I think we toured and traveled so much that we didn’t realize what was happening until our family members were saying, “Hey, I’m at the grocery store and I’m hearing you,” or my family in D.C. would hear us at a gas station. Then we started doing commercials. When your head is in the ground, you’re just face-down working, you don’t notice. You just take a minute to lift your head up and look around, you say, “Oh, we’ve been working really hard.” [Laughs.]
Sometimes we have to say that to each other, “Look at all the groundwork that we’ve done” and we have to take a minute to just take it in.
MT: We saw Brandi in New York some months ago. We were with Sam Smith and Brandi said, “Man, you guys are everywhere!” And I said, “You’ve got some nerve!”
TT: [Laughs.]
MT: When your friend, your counterpart says that it’s really something. I talked to Nathaniel Rateliff the other day and that’s the first thing he said. I said, “Y’all are doing the same thing.” But I think that it’s something we do need to start acknowledging and paying attention to because you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been. It’s been a wonderful journey.
I’m glad you mentioned Brandi and Jason because they are two of the first to ever take us out on the road with them and offer up their audiences to us. [The same for] Indigo Girls, Valerie June, Chris Stapleton, Zach Bryan. Al Green, the legend himself! It’s just been such a wonderful, wonderful journey.
