‘We want you to feel overwhelmed by hope’: music, marriage and mortality with the War and Treaty

Michael Trotter did his very best to stop Tanya from falling for him. I’m a screwup, he told her. I’ve already got a divorce in my 20s, I’ve been to war twice, I’m wounded. I am not a catch. “She just looked at me and said, ‘Are you done?’” says Michael. “‘Because I’m going to tell you what I see. I see a king. You just need the right kind of queen.’”

The resulting partnership, both marital and musical, has proven her right. See the Trotters in a room together and you almost feel sorry for other couples. Watch them on stage, as the War and Treaty, and you’re transported into the heart of their relationship. Their Glastonbury debut last year had the devotional fervour of a revival meeting, and their fourth album, Lover’s Game, released this month, bursts with emotion, inspired by the gospel and country sounds they have both loved since childhood.

It is a creation of great experience and even greater joy. Last year they opened for John Legend’s tour; their own love story is so epic that Legend is now making it into a movie.

Michael is an army veteran who suffers with depression and PTSD and for whom music is therapy. Sometimes he will sit and write several songs a day just to process his feelings. “I’m thinking of one right now,” he says. The US had just invaded Iraq when he enlisted at 21; he was stationed in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces in Baghdad. When fellow soldiers died, he sang tributes to them on a piano he found there. “I was very blessed in the leaders I had,” he says. “They all encouraged me in my music-making. They saw I had a different calling.”

His service completed, he met Tanya Blount in August 2010, when they played the same festival in Maryland. Tanya was on her second musical career – her first had peaked in her teens, when she appeared opposite Lauryn Hill and Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2 and signed a deal with Sean Combs’s record label to become an R&B star at 16. “I knew at eight that this was what I wanted to do,” says Tanya.

But she took a break from the business after an unsatisfactory experience with Bad Boy Records. “I’d been in a pretentious world for pretty much most of my teens and 20s,” says Tanya. “In R&B, hip-hop, nothing’s what they say it is. The car’s not theirs, the chain’s not theirs. Everything is rented.”

Michael, by comparison, was candid to a fault. They fell for each other at first sight. “I remember her saying: ‘I’m not looking for a bank account, I’m not looking for a six pack,” says Michael. “And I jumped for joy because I don’t have neither.”

The sound they arrived at as a duo is the product of relentless work and ruthless honesty. “We’d be doing eight hours of rehearsal at home, and if the song didn’t move us we’d trash it,” says Michael. “If we’re not feeling teary, or some emotional connection, it’s not worth it.” Some of their most upbeat choruses hide the couple’s trauma in plain sight. Five More Minutes was named for the day in 2017 that Michael had decided to end his life and Tanya asked him to stay with her just a little longer.

Tanya has had her own brushes with mortality, including a frightening bout of Covid in the first wave of the pandemic. “We’d just performed at the Grammys, we’d been invited to go on tour with John Legend, and then I thought Tanya was going to die,” says Michael.

“Laying in the bed taught me: if you think you’re there, you’re never there,” Tanya adds. “Nothing is promised.”

Their mantra, “Every day by grace”, resonates with the church tradition they grew up in and they’re not afraid to own the gospel roots of their music, says Michael. “That grit, that power, that resilience that is in Aretha Franklin’s version of Amazing Grace; the reverence that is in Mahalia Jackson’s How I Got Over. Gospel singers were placed in our world to be the uplifters. And for Tanya and me that’s in our blood. We want people to come to our shows and go away feeling overwhelmed by hope.”

As for their marriage, 12 years on, it just keeps getting better. “Our game now is who can outdo each other in that department,” says Michael. “‘You bring me home flowers? OK, that’s cool, I’m gonna go get you some perfume.’ ‘Well, I’m gonna get up and cook you breakfast.’ ‘And I’m gonna get up and thank you for cooking me breakfast …’”

“It’s an exchange,” says Tanya. “People say I saved him, but we were saving each other.”