Exclusive: Thompson Square Release New Album, 'Masterpiece'

Thompson Square, the husband and wife duo made up of Keifer and Shawna Thompson, is back with a brand-new album, Masterpiece. The 12-track record illustrates where the couple has been, personally and professionally, since their last album, Just Feels Good, was released in 2013.

"This is kind of a culmination of the last five years of our life starting from the best thing that happened in our life, finishing with the worst thing that's happened in our life over the last five years and kind of everything in between," Keifer tells PopCulture.com. "We haven't had a record out in five years and once we got to go in the studio and build this, it just kind of became a piece of us. A lot of us ended up on the record.

"I think it's the most transparent record we've ever done," he continues. "We had a lot of freedom in making this record and a lot of adversity and celebration and some good days and bad days. It's exactly what we needed at this time in our life."

The title track of Masterpiece was written by Keifer, inspired by the birth of their son, Cooper, now two-and-a half years old.

"It was kind of weird," Keifer recalls. "I get woken up sometimes with song titles. We were at our house in Alabama and at about 6:00 AM.; it woke me up and 'Masterpiece' was in my head. I didn't know really what it meant. I tried to go back to sleep and I couldn't. So I got up and I went out by the pool and had my guitar and my laptop and I was just kind of trying to figure out what 'Masterpiece' meant to me and what my definition of that was.

"To me, really, it meant an individual's best work," he adds. "What have you done that you'll never be able to beat no matter what you do? To me, that was Cooper. It didn't matter awards, hits, money, any of that stuff. It just pales in comparison after you have a kid and you get to hold them for the first time. Everything just changes."

Cooper, who goes on the road with his parents most of the time, has enriched their lives in ways they never imagined.

"It's been an absolute blessing to have him in our life," Keifer says. "So I just really started thinking about him and comparing him to other masterpiece-type situations and things that we think about when we hear that term. To me, he's as important as these worldly global achievements."

With half a decade between albums, the couple had plenty of time to write, and listen to, new songs – a freedom they hadn't experienced until now.

"That was a beautiful thing about this record, too, is having the time to write," Shawna says. "Because when a song takes off like 'Are You Going to Kiss Me or Not' did, you're kind of thrown into this whirlwind and you're on the road and you're super busy taking care of working that particular song or that album and you don't have time to create. So it was pretty amazing to have time off to be able to create new stuff. "

One of the first songs they wrote for Masterpiece, "Up in Smoke," was written very early in the process of working on their latest project.

"Some of the songs on this record are three years old," explains Keifer. "The oldest one is three years old. When we wrote it that day, it's very few times it happens in a songwriter-artist's life but we wrote that day and couldn't stop listening to it. We're not the kind of people, like some artists are, that just go around and listen to their own music. I do that a lot with new songs that I write or something like that just to kind of get a feel for who it might fit or if I like it, if I need to make changes during the editing process.

"But this song in particular, it just hit us, it struck us," he remarks. "So throughout three years of writing songs and trying to find songs, it still stuck out. It's called 'Up in Smoke' and that was one that we were hoping that would withstand the test of time and it did."

Although both established songwriters, who together wrote their second No. 1 hit, "If I Didn't Have You," the couple found it important to take outside songs as well as write some of the tracks on Masterpiece.

"It's very difficult to find outside songs that could fit into your world," Keifer says. "Because Thompson Square, you're the married couple duo and no matter what you want, you're always going to be talking about love, even when you're not. So those kinds of songs, it's really hard to tackle that subject in a different way all the time."

With so much time between albums, Thompson Square had plenty of time to figure out what their goal for Masterpiece really was. And, perhaps surprisingly, their ultimate goal has nothing to do with record sales or charting singles.

"The main goal was to feed our fans that haven't had music from us in five years," Keifer reveals. "The other goal was to produce it and do it the way that we wanted to do that we've never been able to do. With the dynamic of how the music business has changed over the last few years – and another goal was just to be independent for a while if not permanently. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.

"That's the scary and exciting thing about what we're doing right now is because we didn't try to hop into another record deal immediately because we felt that we needed music out tomorrow and that could be a long, long process," he concludes. "Getting into another deal and getting in line perhaps, and you just never know how that's going to work out. But I think just being true to ourselves and showing our fans that we still love them, we're still here. We haven't gone anywhere."

Purchase Masterpiece at ThompsonSquare.com.

Photo Credit: ThompsonSquare.com