The Lowest Pair
Wed, 21 Oct, 7:30 PM CDT
Doors open
6:30 PM CDT
SPACE
1245 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60202
Description
The Lowest Pair has questions. The duo, made up of Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee, know that we tend to see duality as a problem. We want life to be linear, working through the dark to finally get to the light. Grief to joy, despair to hope, confusion to clarity––not a jangly cycle we can’t escape. But through their incandescent folk songs, the Lowest Pair often ask: What if we sit with the mess? What if that’s not just more peaceful, but more magical, too?
On their 8th album Always As Young As We’ll Ever Be, the Lowest Pair prove that over the last dozen years together, they’ve become some of modern roots music’s most mesmerizing, thoughtful purveyors. Produced by Tucker Martine (The Decemberists), the 10-track album puts the duo’s stark lyricism, string-driven arrangements, and raw compatibility on brilliant display and as a result, Always As Young As We’ll Ever Be pulses with life.
The Lowest Pair’s musicianship is another beautiful testament not just to playing that breathes, but playing that listens. Winter, who grew up in Arkansas but has lived in Washington State for the last two decades, and Lee, a Minnesota native, first gained attention as poetic singer-songwriters on banjos. While their family of strings has expanded, their fundamental approach hasn’t: Respond to sounds and stories the other is making.
Event Information
Age Limit
All Ages
Bluegrass
The Lowest Pair
The Lowest Pair
Bluegrass
The Lowest Pair features the duel banjo picking of Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee. Draped in Kendl’s high lonesome harmonies and Palmer’s Midwest croon, their debut release, 36¢, (Team Love Records) was hailed by In Your Speakers as “the first great release of 2014.” On February 24th, 2015, Team Love will release their sophomore album, The Sacred Heart Sessions.
Arkansas-born and now homesteading in Olympia, Washington, Kendl Winter sprouts alfalfa beans in mason jars in the back of the tour van and spreads her songs across the country Johnny Appleseed-style. Kendl brings to The Lowest Pair her wonderfully weaving poetry of song, old and new, and a voice somewhere between Gillian Welch and Iris DeMent, with a little Olympia twist. Palmer T. Lee, who hails from Minneapolis, was nineteen years old when he inherited a couple of banjos and discovered he could reassemble them into his dream instrument. Former front man for the much loved, high energy bluegrass band The Boys n’ the Barrels, Palmer’s songs are distilled into the warm sweet sounds of his percussive wordplay, and the melodic interludes of his own unique style played on a pieced together banjo.
After nearly a year of traveling the country playing clubs, hotels, house shows, back yards and street corners, they
found their way back up to Minnesota, this time to Duluth where they sat down to record the follow-up to 36¢. Linking up with Tom Fabjance at an old church seemed like the perfect way to expand on their sound without diluting their original magical formula. The Sacred Heart Sessions is an album that allows the listener to enter the space that surrounds its creation. One can virtually feel the walls and vaulted ceiling of the old wooden church rising up, creating a natural reverb and warming the air.
Be it Kendl’s punk roots, her admiration for the traditional American songbook, or the gravitational pull she sensed drawing her to Olympia, it’s her combining these talents and creative impulses with Palmer’s Midwestern charm, the long winters spent listening to a steady diet of Townes Van Zandt and John Hartford and the strange moment of fate that left him with two inherited banjos as a young man; this combination has resulted in a uniquely original sound that is The Lowest Pair.