Tag: the lowest pair

BGS 5+5: Kendl Winter

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Kendl Winter
Hometown: Olympia, Washington
Latest Album: Banjo Mantras
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): “Lower half of The Lowest Pair”

What other art forms – literature, film, dance, painting, etc. – inform your music?

I like this question, because I think everything you do, witness, consume, walk by, dance with, or touch informs your (my) music. Most books I’m reading make their way into my lyrics directly or indirectly. I know I’ve quoted or misquoted from E.E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan, Hafiz, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Rumi, Rebecca Solnit, Thich Nhat Hanh, and probably so many others. All the authors and poets and spiritual leaders I’ve read or listened to and been moved by have woven their ponderings into mine and in turn the tumble of words that spill out onto my morning pages is often informed by those thoughts.

I watch a lot of film and I love movement. I go for long runs in the Northwest – or wherever I currently am – and the landscape informs my music, or the highway does, or the venue. I’m (we) are so porous and regularly trying to make sense of the cocktail of experience I’ve been sipping on. That said, this is an instrumental record, so for me it’s a new kind of transcription or interpretation of the collage of experiences in my head.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

My Hebrew school teacher back in Arkansas said he had a video of me as a 5 year-old singing to a stick of butter. In second grade, I wrote a song about landfills and saving the birds. My folks were both classically trained musicians, one a high school string teacher, and the other a low brass professor, so I had music and the example of disciplined musicians practicing around me all the time. As kids, my sister and I were often crawling through the orchestra pit in the Arkansas Symphony or falling asleep in the balcony.

I loved punk music and dabbled with guitar and drums though high school, although I don’t think I actually knew I wanted to be a musician until my early 20s, when I had just moved to Olympia. In the Little Rock area of Arkansas and in Olympia, Washington there was/is such a vibrant DIY scene for music. Some of my first attempts at performing were in Olympia and I had only written half-songs, so they were very short and with a lot of apologies.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

I would say lately has been the toughest time for me, writing lyrics at least. Maybe that’s why I’ve been enjoying the spaciousness of instrumentals for a while with the Banjo Mantras. It’s felt less exacting to let my art be more ethereal and open to interpretation. Something about the last five years has made me feel less sure about what to share, in terms of my own verbal songwriting. I think I’m more self conscious or potentially private and maybe more aware of my voice in a way that makes me feel a bit uncertain of what more can be said from my vantage. Songwriting has always been such a huge piece of how I interpret life, though, and it’s an integral piece of my personal process. So I’m still writing, just having a more difficult time sharing it.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

If I had to write a mission statement for my career, I guess it would be to let curiosity and interest/passion lead me. My music has never been easy to put in a genre and my voice and songwriting has changed over the years. It’s been great to work in the Lowest Pair, because my bandmate Palmer T. Lee is similar in that his sound is difficult to box in, and that both of us have roots and interest in traditional sounds, but are always curious about expanding upon the subject matter and textures in our duo. The Banjo Mantras are just an expansion of that I think. I love the sound of a solo banjo and wanted to share some of the meanderings I found in various tunings and grooves. But yeah, I think my mission statement would involve personal growth, following curiosity and passion, a focus on heart-centric themes, and a goal for connection.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

I spend at least an hour most days going outside for a run or walk. I live in one of the most beautiful places, the PNW, so a short jaunt from my house and I’m next to the Puget Sound inlet full of kingfishers, seagulls, blue herons, and mergansers depending on the season. Low tides and high tides, I see and hear eagles swooping about and on a rare sunny horizon I can see the Olympic Mountains. The other day, I came home with a sticky pocket full of cottonwood buds for my housemate to make a salve with. The nettles have just begun showing this spring. I go for regular wanderings and collect pictures and sounds and try to make a regular practice of noticing things. Less like a practice, and more like just the way my days are, but I recognize it as an integral part of my centering practice.

Photo Credit: Molley Gillispie

BGS 5+5: The Lowest Pair

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Lowest Pair
Hometown: Olympia, Washington
Latest Album: Horse Camp
Rejected Band Name: The Goodle Days

Answers by Palmer T. Lee

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

Oh, this is very common practice in both directions. Sometimes a writer will take on a character as well, using “me” when its actually someone else. And that character could be a real person or quite frequently an amalgamation of people and experiences both real or concocted. Sometimes topics can feel a little too personal while they also feel relevant and powerful to write about and share so a new character is born of necessity. And of course, sometimes the most potent way to express this seems to be to keep it personal and use “me” when I mean “me” and yet the situation may not be 100% literal or accurate to the source. I mean, don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, eh? The most important thing is to find what best serves the song, how the intention of the piece will be conveyed most effectively.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

I think it’s fair to say literature is the largest non-music art form that influences our music. While we have both always pursued musicianship, developing our technique and skill set, learning bluegrass and old time fiddle tunes, etc., we are songwriters first and musicianship is largely part of that toolbox. If someone were to deep dive into our lyricism they would likely find a lot of sampling and referencing of whoever we were reading or moved by at the time. And further, our styles are pretty influenced by writers as well. The playful word and phrase bending of e.e. cummings, the literary landscape paintings of Steinbeck, the psychospiritual paradigm twisting of Thich Nhat Hanh, to name a few.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

It’s truly a blessing to find good work, to do something that feels important to both yourself and for others. On a personal level, we get to create these little tools that we can return to over time. Little devices we can process things through, both intellectually and emotionally. If a song doesn’t seem to be serving us (we’re not feeling it) it tends to gradually slink out of the set list. If it’s a song that has spent a lot of time with us there is probably a reason for that and these songs will likely return to rotation later with a whole new set of meanings and associations. The great bonus of this craft is that other people get to use them as well. Listening to a record can transport you to somewhere you didn’t know you needed to go, somewhere you forgot was there, somewhere you’ve been trying to figure out how to access. And in a live performance we all get to do that together, everyone on their own trip but also sharing the space and time with each other (a wonderful social experience for introverts! Ha!).

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

Whenever possible I love to wash my hands before playing instruments, especially before a concert. There is something resetting and care-taking about it.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

A significant part of being a writer is spending time not writing, or at least not making anything, maybe thinking about writing, maybe not at all, maybe not even identifying as a writer for a while, maybe collecting notes from an overheard conversation or trying to describe the wind just for fun, or maybe just being quiet for a few days.

Kendl spends a lot of time hiking the Cascade and Olympic mountains and running through the densely forested parks of Olympia. I seem to frequently find myself living in the woods or an otherwise rough-and-tumble environment where you might need to walk fifty yards to do your business or cook and it’s quiet and the elements have a say in the flow of your day.

I think these influences can be both heard and intuited in our music. Place names will find their way into our stories, critters and plants, a sense of awe or isolation or reverence or a passing conversation with the colors and smells of a quiet dawn.

Photo Credit: Molley Gillispie

Building on Double Banjo, The Lowest Pair Concoct ‘The Perfect Plan’

Posted on by Editor

The Lowest Pair may be best known as a double-banjo folksinger duo, yet their new album is a full-band effort that somehow sounds like a complete departure without actually straying from home. It’s a fitting theme, considering that the release of The Perfect Plan – their sixth album in seven years – arrives during a global pandemic. BGS spoke with bandmates Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee as they were isolated in separate homes in Olympia, Washington.

“We’re supposed to have been on the road now — a couple of festivals the past couple of weeks,” says Winter, who spent this past winter in Antarctica working at a scientific research station and running the annual South Pole Marathon, in which she set a women’s time record. “We were thinking we were going to hit the ground running and now we’re just hitting the ground, trying to figure out how to promote the record in this new paradigm.”

On the bright side, with any luck, the fact that everyone is stuck at home will provide plenty of time to digest The Perfect Plan’s complex instrumentation and intuitive arrangements, worked out with multi-instrumentalist and producer Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes). Although previous efforts feature the stripped-down duo sound fans have come to enjoy in their live sets, this project is a little more aurally ambitious. Listeners still get their banjo and acoustic guitar, but these are afloat amid bass, drums, and electric guitar with all its effects.

“We wanted to hear what [our music] would sound like with a bigger sound,” Winter says. “We went into the studio pretty open to what Mogis was thinking, in terms of production. I think we both have dreamed about having drums and bass behind us. It’s not as easy to do on the road, but it was kind of a fantasy record.”

Lee, a Minnesota native who spent his winter at a writing retreat in Wisconsin, agrees. “We’ve definitely been talking about doing bigger band stuff in different ways over the years. Logistically, it’s a bit of a challenge and a bit of a gamble, I suppose. Being a duo, you keep your overhead pretty low. It’s just simpler that way. But it’s definitely been a dream of ours for a while.”

The Lowest Pair began when Winter and Lee were playing in other groups. They spotted each other at a bluegrass festival. “I remember seeing Palmer’s string band and noticing a kindred thing he was going for,” Winter says. “He played the banjo but differently from other people, putting more notes in it. He has a soulful voice, saying stuff that isn’t very common in bluegrass music. He had a song about tea and I had a song about tea, about drinking tea. I felt like … we’re going for similar things from really different places, with different vehicles.”

That night, they spent hours jamming around a campfire. Though they continued to follow each other on social media, it was another five years before their paths crossed again. Both were considering solo projects and decided instead to join forces, ultimately naming their duo after a John Hartford poem.

Winter remembers: “Palmer got a hold of me and said, ‘You look like you need a singing buddy.’ He proposed the idea of doing an album together. As soon as we started singing together people responded immediately. Both of us were like, ‘Well, we’ll just do this.’ We kind of had shows lined up before we even had a band, because I had been working on a solo project and no one really minded that I came with somebody else.”

As it happened, when that summer wrapped, Lee had studio time booked with Dave Simonett of Trampled by Turtles as producer. “I was going to do a solo record and then I [told Dave], ‘Hey, I’m working on this new project. Let’s do this instead.’ That’s when 36 cents happened,” Lee says of the duo’s 2014 debut album.

A string of quickly-released projects followed as Winter was on a roll, churning out great songwriting for one recording after another. Somewhere along the way, the duo got into a rhythm, barely even needing to break from a tour in order to jump into a studio and produce another album. But the idea of, at some point, slowing down long enough to put a full-band effort together kept gestating. They wanted to explore sounds beyond bluegrass, to see how their songs might be able to stretch them in new directions.

By the time they visited Mogis’ studio in Omaha last year, they knew almost instinctively that it would be the place. Though Winter and Lee stuck to the core of their sound on The Perfect Plan, balancing their banjos and vocals, there are a few tracks where they veered especially far from the norm.

On “Morning Light,” for example, Winter played most of the instruments herself while Lee simply added vocals. “We decided not to have banjo on the track,” she says. “That was one we actually did [with] layers and built it up. We had a vocal line that was … kind of an obnoxious vocal line that didn’t really work. We wrote lyrics for that song during the time we were there. That one got fleshed out in the studio. But, most of [the songs] we performed all together with the band, so it was really like, ‘Learn the song and let’s go.’”

“Mike had the demos for a couple of months before we came in,” Lee adds. “He had all sorts of ideas and had some musicians in mind. Then it kind of just happened organically. Kendl and I started playing through the songs and everyone would start jamming. It was pretty awesome.”

Mogis encouraged the duo to bring their own drummer, so they roped in Minneapolis mainstay J.T. Bates (Bonny Light Horseman, Big Red Machine). Fans of bluegrass know well that banjos and drums don’t always mix, as the latter can so easily overpower the percussive tonality of the former. Luckily Bates’ subtlety is so on-point his rhythms seem to follow the duo’s acoustic strings, rather than the other way around.

Lee explains, “On that ‘Wild Animal’ track, for instance, we just started jamming. Rather than drive the song in a particular direction, J.T. was able to find the best way to accent what was already happening.”

“Sometimes as we arrange, we fill up the space according to how we’re going to play as a duo,” adds Winter. “On the one hand, it gives us endless options. On the other hand, it gives us really limited options as to how many different sounds we can do as two people. But I think we left some space on these tunes to let people be creative. We didn’t want to get in there and have too strong an idea [of how everything should sound] because we knew Mike was magic and we wanted him to have a voice in it.”

Thanks to this somewhat laissez-faire approach, the arrangements are deeply intuitive, an extension of the intimate pairing of the duo itself. Rather than drown out the delicate subtlety that makes the Lowest Pair such a stirring band in the first place, The Perfect Plan centers the duo well and allows their unique vibe to lead the way.

The result is so sonically pleasing, it can be easy to forget there are so many people in the room behind the group. Winter and Lee had planned to pull that studio band together for a few live dates once the album dropped, but that part of the release schedule is on hold for now. Luckily, there’s plenty of richness on this album to dig into in the coming weeks.

But if The Perfect Plan is the album the Lowest Pair has been building up to for years, don’t mistake the duo for having hit their stride.

“A stride implies it was kind of smooth,” says Winter, provoking laughter from her bandmate. “I think we just got hooked on each other and the project has a momentum. I think we just kind of rolled into a lifestyle where this is what we do.”

Photo credit: Sarah Kathryn Wainwright

Blue Ox Festival Stretches Bluegrass Boundaries

Posted on by Editor

The Blue Ox Festival is bringing the good stuff to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on June 13-15, with headliners like the Infamous Stringdusters, Trampled by Turtles, and Railroad Earth. Nearly all of the bands on the three-day lineup share a strong acoustic music influence. And while more than a few of these bands are stretching the boundaries of bluegrass, they’re also picking up thousands of new fans along the way.

Here are some highlights from this year’s lineup:

THURSDAY: The Infamous Stringdusters (pictured above) are back with Rise Sun, their first album since winning a Grammy. They’ll top off the night on Thursday, taking the stage at 10:30 pm and playing until midnight. Earlier in the night, fans can catch local favorites Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, approaching a decade together after meeting in college in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. The Lil Smokies and The Lowest Pair will also perform on the Main Stage, while Old Salt Union and Grassfed play the Side Stage. After midnight, Black River Revue and Chicken Wire Empire take on the Backwoods Stage.

FRIDAY: Trampled by Turtles, the pride of the upper Midwest music scene, are making their first-ever appearance at Blue Ox this year, just after a set from their friends in Pert Near Sandstone. The exceptional lineup also boasts the Travelin’ McCourys, who will play a set dedicated to Sam Bush (who bowed out of the festival to recover from a recent surgery), along with their own material. The roster also features Fruition, the Del McCoury Band, and Jeff Austin Band, as well as Americana favorites Sarah Shook & the Disarmers and Pokey LaFarge. Check out the Side Stage for sets by the Larry Keel Experience, Cascade Crescendo, Barbaro, and David Huckfelt. Once again, night owls can swoop down to the Backwoods Stage for more music — this time from Horseshoes & Hand Grenades and Jeff Austin Band.

SATURDAY: One of the most entertaining bands on the festival trail, Railroad Earth effortlessly connect fans of quality songwriting, awesome jamming, and exceptional musicianship. They’ll follow Pert Near Sandstone on the main stage – but this is not the day to arrive late. The inspired afternoon lineup features the innovation of Billy Strings, the undeniable power of The Dead South, cool insight from acoustic blues artist Charlie Parr, and the straightforward bluegrass sounds of The Earls of Leicester featuring Jerry Douglas. Grab some lunch and check out Peter Rowan’s Carter Stanley’s Eyes as well as Them Coulee Boys as the festival grounds start to fill up.

The Side Stage offers a compelling roster as well, with sets by the People Brothers Band, The Wooks, Feeding Leroy, and Dusty Heart. After midnight, Armchair Boogie settles into the Backwoods Stage, along with the Blue Ox Superjam.

Even if you can’t make it to the festival, you can watch key sets from the weekend on The Bluegrass Situation via JamgrassTV!

Photo of Infamous Stringdusters: Aaron Farrington
Photo of Trampled by Turtles: David McClister
Photo of Railroad Earth: Jason Siegel

WATCH: The Lowest Pair, ‘When They Dance the Mountains Shake’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Lowest Pair (Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee)
Hometown: Olympia, WA and Minneapolis, MN
Song: "When They Dance the Mountains Shake"
Album: Fern Girl & Ice Man
Release Date: April 15
Label: Team Love Records

In Their Words: "The music video for 'When They Dance the Mountains Shake' was recorded in my friend Sara Sparrow's studio in Olympia, Washington, by my good buddy Kevin Rainsberry (drummer for RVIVR). I wanted to feature the strength, art, humor, and camaraderie of my friends and community, and illustrate the retrospective story of the (if you could call it a) chorus-line that repeats itself in the song …'on the other side.'" — Kendl Winter

Photo credit: Joseph Daniel Robert O'Leary

LISTEN: The Lowest Pair, ‘I Reckon I’m Fixin’ on Kickin’ Round to Pick a Little’

Posted on by Editor

Pretty much anyone get away with making music with a band full of loud instruments blaring. But, when artistry holds up in the sparest of settings, that's when it's true. That's where the Lowest Pair comes in with their duo of banjos and voices. Much like Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn, Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee play off each other and the long-tail of American roots music.

After meeting at a music festival on the Mississippi River, Winter and Lee became friends and, eventually, collaborators — their first couple of releases, 36¢ and The Sacred Heart Sessions, earning a fair share of kudos in Americana circles. For the upcoming I Reckon I’m Fixin’ on Kickin’ Round to Pick a Little: Volume 1, the Pair turned to traditional tunes and road-tested arrangements for songs like “Cluck Old Hen,” “Danville Girl,” and “Shortning Bread.” Then, with nary a bit of pomp or circumstance, they made a record.

"Well, the title says it all,” Lee offers. “We reckoned we were fixin' on kickin' around to pick a little, so we figured we'd record it. We don't make much effort to sound like an old time band, but we love the repertoire, the sound of that music, and we love playing the tunes. Once we forget half the words, make up some of our own, and filter the melodies through our own quirky styles, we end up with what we like call our own derangements. We figure that's just the American way — it's tradition to screw things up a little bit. Young, Sprinfsteen, Dylan … they've all done records like that. So we figured we'd join the club.”

I Reckon I’m Fixin’ on Kickin’ Round to Pick a Little: Volume1 will be released on July 24 via Team Love Records.