Over the last two decades, Adam Turley and Sarah Balliet, the husband-and-wife team at the heart of the band Murder by Death, have been on a wild journey together. However, their journey began separately and very differently.
Sarah, the elder sister of a brother named Max and the daughter of two public attorneys, switched from playing the piano to playing the cello upon her family’s arrival in Louisville from California. What made her decide on the cello? “Honestly, it was one of those things where they were like, ‘If you want to get out of class, you can go to the gym and sign up for orchestra’ type of things,” she said.
“Short-term thinking,” Adam said, chuckling at the arbitrary choice his wife made in elementary school. He was raised in Detroit by an art-dealer father, who was always on the road, and an Italian-immigrant mother, who worked in human resources. They divorced when Adam was young.
Adam’s childhood was spent celebrating creativity and the appreciation of art and music, growing up with priceless lithographs of famous artists hanging on his father’s wall. “It was from him that I learned you could make a living on the road,” Adam said. Things changed when his stepmother gave him her collection of vinyl, which included albums by artists like Iggy Pop, The Cure and David Bowie.
Sarah’s journey with music was much more traditional, as she is a classically trained musician. Throughout middle school, she excelled in public school orchestras among kids who weren’t serious musicians but mostly were there so they didn’t have to be in gym—a sentiment she could appreciate, but it wasn’t pushing her enough. For high school, she auditioned and was accepted at Louisville’s Youth Performing Arts School, which had a more rigorous curriculum, with a primary focus on her study of the cello.
“In high school, I had a teacher who would yell at us when we were being jerks, ‘This isn’t rock ’n’ roll!’ ” Sarah recalled with a smile. “And I remember thinking, ‘Damn! Maybe, it would be more fun if it was.’ ” In retrospect, Sarah said she misses playing in an orchestra but loves, even more, the music she’s making now.
When Adam was 12 or 13 years old, he bought his first guitar for $20 from a friend’s mom with money he’d earned mowing lawns. He began teaching himself how to play, listening to those old records. Soon, he was regularly playing guitar with a friend. “Eventually, we needed a singer,” Adam said. “I was like, ‘I’ll give it a shot.’ ”
Sarah began to question her rigid training, which encouraged musicians to remain in the proverbial box of the classical genre, when she heard the album Appalachia Waltz by Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor. “It was the three of them reinterpreting Appalachian folk tunes,” she said of the album. “It opened my eyes to the fact that you can do anything you want when it comes to music. And just because I play the cello, it doesn’t mean I have to stay in one box. This is an open field.”
The two musical strangers finally crossed paths at a house party during Sarah’s freshman year at Indiana University. Adam had started a band that would later become the framework for Murder by Death. He was discouraged the night he met Sarah because, after only one gig, both the band’s violinist and viola player had quit. Apparently, their instructors had banned them from playing rock ’n’ roll because it was ruining their traditional form. So, Sarah mentioned that she played the cello. “It took all of my strength to say that out loud,” she recalled of the conversation. “Because I knew if I said it, I was going to have to show up and play with these guys. And they’ll be playing electric guitars!”
“I really wanted strings in the band,” Adam said. “Besides the complexity and dynamic it adds to a band, I loved how theatrical it sounded—the drama of it all. So, she shaped the sound of the band in a huge way. If it hadn’t been for her, we would probably have morphed into something else.”
Sarah came into the band with rigid, structured training. Adam was an improvisational, self-taught troubadour. Those two conflicting approaches to music seem to strike at the core of what continues to drive Murder by Death creatively.
As wonderful a musician as she was, Sarah struggled initially. “If you listen to our early recordings, it sounds like I had just picked up the cello,” she said. “I was just so petrified. Being able to play whatever I want—it paralyzed me.”
“I was in a band in high school,” Adam said. “So, I had a five-year jump on her when it came to writing. It really does come from a completely different part of the brain. It was not a tool she had in her toolbox yet.”
“Oh, yeah,” she agreed. “I would just stick to the bass notes and try to hide back in the arrangement. It was a hard mold to break out of.”
Eventually, as the band got its feet under it, they needed a name. They settled on Murder by Death, a brutal-sounding name that would better fit a thrash metal band, not a trippy, pseudo-alt-country band out of Indiana. “That’s what you get when you name a band when you’re 18 or 19 years old,” Adam said with a laugh. “It was that short-term thinking again. We were so young. We weren’t sure what the band was going to be, and we had no thoughts on longevity. We were just going to be a young band. We thought we might crisscross the country a few times, meet some of our favorite bands, and that would be it.
“We all thought we were going to have to go back to college at some point,” Sarah said with a scoff. “We really did. We didn’t think this was going to be a career.”
As the band was coming together, Sarah and Adam found chemistry and attraction to one another. The day after their first gig, they went out on their first date. From that moment on, as the band grew, so did their relationship.
They played countless early shows in dormitory lobbies, crowded house parties and empty bars. Soon, the band began to find its rhythm, and in 2003, it released its debut album, Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them? The title lifted the tagline from the classic horror film Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The release was a concept album about the Devil waging war on a small Mexican border town. While it didn’t set the world on fire in sales, the album did receive positive reviews from critics.
“We started getting gigs opening for bands that came to town. Then we started getting booked outside of Bloomington, and then all of a sudden, these really big bands were calling wanting us to open for them on a whole tour,” Adam said. “It just all kind of snowballed. Nineteen years later, we’re still here. Now, it’s a bigger, better version.”
The lineup has changed some over the years, but Adam and Sarah’s partnership has remained the driving force for the band. At one point, Murder by Death was touring relentlessly, on the road 200-plus nights a year. “That really was the toughest time in our relationship,” Adam recalled. “When you’re on the road together that much, you are, in a very literal sense, with one another every waking minute of every single day. There is definitely a thing as too much time together.”
“A lot of people think our dynamic is strange,” Sarah said. “In a lot of ways, though, it’s the only thing we’ve ever known. This is how it’s been since I was 18 years old. We’re also really good at communicating with one another—just saying, ‘Hey, I need some time to myself right now.’ ”
After years of relentless touring and developing a loyal fan base, Murder by Death has found sustainable success—with their music appearing in films and on television, consistent album sales, and the band opening concerts for their idols while selling out shows of their own in clubs across the country. The band even hosts an annual weekend getaway, performing each night in the ballroom of The Stanley Hotel, the Colorado hotel that inspired Stephen King’s book The Shining.
In August 2017, the energetic couple took on a new adventure—this time bringing Sarah’s brother, Max, into the action—when they opened the doors of Pizza Lupo.
“We’ve always been passionate about food,” Sarah said of their decision to take on a new project. “Getting to travel all over the world, we’ve been spoiled. This was always a ‘What if?’ or a ‘Someday …’ thing for us.”
She and Max, who also is a musician, had remained close. When she was home for the holidays, the siblings spent their time catching up over cooking, while dreaming of opening a restaurant together. “After enough talking about it, it was finally, like, ‘OK, when are we just going to do this?’ ” Sarah said.
Max had spent his career working his way up through kitchens since he was 16. He ran Louisville’s Holy Mole food truck, and his soft-shell crab tacos once made Food Network Magazine’s list of the top tacos in the country. Max was ready to partner up with Sarah and Adam for a brick and mortar of his own.
“With all of our experience in various aspects of the business, it seemed possible,” Adam said. So, they dumped their life savings into the new dream, Pizza Lupo, acquiring a mid-19th century brick building in Louisville’s Butchertown area to house their venture. Max could run the kitchen and develop the menu. Adam had the renovation experience to remodel the structure, and Sarah took over the paperwork and staffing the new business.
“Every step of this has been way harder than we expected,” Adam said with a smile. “It’s our passion. It’s been a massive undertaking but totally worth it.”
It was clear to Adam, Sarah and Max early on that pizza was the restaurant concept about which they were passionate. So, the three of them took trips to Rome and New York to taste various kinds of pizza in the pursuit of a decision on what type they wanted their restaurant to serve. “We ate stupid amounts of pizza,” Sarah said with a groan. “We went to 14 pizza places in three days on a trip to New York,” Adam added. “And 10 in three days in Rome.” They landed on a traditional Neapolitan style.
Though food is their passion, Adam and Sarah have no plans to stay put in Louisville running a restaurant. The Murder by Death train soldiers on, which means they are eager to do less hands-on work in the restaurant. When they first opened the doors, Sarah was working 80-hour weeks to keep all of the proverbial balls in the air.
“Once we were able to figure out what we needed,” Sarah said of their early learning curve, “I was able to hire the help we needed, and I can step back a little. I’ve found there’s still so much work to do without even stepping foot in the restaurant.”
One place the couple has always been hands-off at Pizza Lupo is the kitchen, where Max runs the show. “I stay out it,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “He does a great job. We’re all creative people, and there’s a point when you don’t want to hear someone tell you how to play your cello part. You know what I mean?”
Now that the restaurant is up and running, the band is thriving as always. It’s hard not to wonder if maybe another restaurant might be the next move for them. For Sarah and Adam, there’s an easy answer to that question. “We put everything we had into opening this restaurant,” Adam said. “We’re a mom-and-pop place; we don’t have a bunch of investors. We can’t do this again.”
“Oh, God, no!” Sarah said. “I think it’s like childbirth—it’s too soon. I still remember the pain.” No matter what their next adventure might be, I think it’s safe to say, they will be going on it together.