The Courettes wrote their first album (Here Are The Courettes) while traveling between Denmark and Brazil. Flavia and Martin Couri met in 2013, during a two-week Brazilian tour with their bands, the Autoramas and the Colombian Neckties, respectively. They spent the next two years in a long-distance relationship.
“‘The Boy I Love,’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Yoko Ono,’ ‘I’ve Been Walking’…” Flavia ticked off the songs. “All the titles were talking about jet lag and crossing oceans, traveling through a million seas. That’s how the band actually came to life, through this transatlantic love story.”
They saw each other in-person as often as possible and filled in the gaps via Skype.
“We had our computers going 24/7,” Martin said, “so we could also always hear each other when we were home. It felt like we were not so far away as we physically were. Because we could hear the sounds, we could be together while 10,000 kilometers apart.”
During one of Flavia’s first trips to visit Martin in Denmark, she showed him some of the songs she had written on the plane, and they went to a studio to record. Their first gig turned into their first album, and “everything escalated pretty fast,” Flavia said.
This sweeping, spontaneous love story would make an excellent blockbuster. The reality wasn’t always glamorous, but soon they were all in.
“We had no plans whatsoever,” Flavia recalled. “And Martin has a daughter that was six years old back then, and he told me, ‘Well, I cannot move to Brazil,’ right? It’s great because I come from a family where my father was totally absent in my life. So I thought, ‘You got extra points with me.’ He’s not just gonna run away with some Brazilian woman he met. I moved to Denmark, so it was my call in the end. I only had my former band who actually connected me to Brazil. I was more in Denmark than in Brazil. I was just coming back to perform the shows and then come back to Denmark to have my days off, which was very expensive. It was a very expensive love.”
The Courettes were bonded by their love of music, but specifically the sounds and aesthetics of the 1960s. From an early age, Flavia was drawn to iconic bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Seeds and the Birds. She was also influenced by writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and the films of Frederico Fellini.
“What we like is the freedom… We don’t have to ask anybody for permission to go somewhere. We can just do it. And that freedom is worth much more than money.”
Martin is an admirer of space age design, which is reflected in their home. “We like to say that we live in that future that never happened,” Flavia said. “I would like to see how the world would be doing nowadays if the dream was not over, and the man didn’t win. We’ve tried to believe in the future that they imagined back then.”
Their newest album is inspired by Motown and the Spector Wall of Sound, with tracks that take cues from the Beach Boys’ distinctive California surfer melodies.
The Soul Of… The Fabulous Courettes was released in 2024. It’s an album that provokes movement and gentle head-banging (if there is such a thing), best listened to from the turntable.
Flavia is the vocalist, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist, and she experiments with castanets, timpani and bass throughout the LP. As the drummer, Martin has to hold down the rhythm while still introducing the spontaneous fun for which the Courettes are best known.
“California” feels as familiar upon first listen as any tune from Cass Elliot—but especially the beloved “Don’t Let the Good Life Pass You By.”
“California” and “Run Run Runaway” benefit from the vocals of The Crystals’ La La Brooks and mixing from Darian Sahanaja, who worked on the production of Brian Wilson’s Smile.
The Courettes tour extensively to support the creation of new music and their lifestyles as full-time musicians. Over the past decade, they have brought their four albums to Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, South America and Europe.
Streaming services bring in notoriously little money for musicians, so it’s the touring and the merch sales that keep the Courettes afloat. Luckily, their ’60s psychedelic garage rock niche means that many of their fans are fans of retro media and continue to buy physical memorabilia like records.
“We play 140 gigs a year, but we never played more than 12 gigs straight because we need to go back to our son,” Flavia said. “So in a way, for five people with five different families, or just if nobody had a kid, and we had a kid—it can be a little tricky to find the right partners, and of course, the touring also takes a toll on the personal relationships you can get.”
“Everybody says a band’s like a marriage,” she added. “In this case, it is a marriage.”
Martin’s daughter is now 18, but she used to attend some of the couple’s tours, and their nine-year-old son loves being backstage.
“Our son is one of the happiest kids we’ve ever seen. Because a lot of parents have other jobs, they come home at six in the evening and put the kids in bed, and that’s it. That’s their relationship with them,” she said. “When we’re at home, we’re 100% parents, and we switch quite fast from tour mode to family mode, which is hard, but it’s possible.”
The most dramatic example of a quick switch from one mode to another? Flavia played a gig the day after giving birth to their son.
Their lifestyles weren’t always so rock n’ roll. Martin used to work as a graphic designer, but he said he could never go back to a traditional working life.
“What we like is the freedom,” he explained. “We don’t have to ask anybody for permission to go somewhere. We can just do it. And that freedom is worth much more than money.”
The St. Louis Evolution Festival will be the Courettes’ first time playing at a mainstream festival with such a wide audience. During their U.S. tour, they will be performing in Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, Cudahy in Wisconsin and Chicago.
They are also releasing a Christmas surprise from Damaged Goods Records and have another release coinciding with their Japanese tour in January.