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PENNY AND SPARROW

Written and recorded over the past year, Penny and Sparrow’s remarkable new album, Olly Olly, is a work of liberation and revelation, a full-throated embrace of the self from a band that’s committed to leaving no stone unturned in their tireless quest for actualization. The songs here are fearless and introspective, embracing growth and change as they reckon with desire, intimacy, doubt, and regret, and the arrangements are similarly bold and thoughtful, augmenting the duo’s rich, hypnotic brand of chamber folk with electronic flourishes and R&B grooves. The duo—Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke—produced Olly Olly themselves, working on their own without an outside collaborator for the first time, and the result is the purest, most authentic act of artistic self-expression the pair have ever achieved.

“Andy and I talk about the process of making this record like a sort of musical Rumspringa,” Jahnke says. “It was an opportunity to truly become ourselves, to evolve outside of the roles we’d been put in—or put ourselves in—because of the way we’d grown up.”

Texas natives Baxter and Jahnke first crossed paths at UT Austin, where they developed a fast friendship and a deeply symbiotic musical connection. Jahnke was a gifted guitarist with an ear for melody, Baxter, an erudite lyricist with a mesmerizing voice and crystalline falsetto, and the duo quickly found that their vocals blended together as if they’d been singing in harmony their whole lives. Beginning with 2013’s ‘Tenboom,’ the staunchly DIY pair released a series of critically lauded records that garnered comparisons to the hushed intimacy of Iron & Wine and the adventurous beauty of Bon Iver, building up a devoted fanbase along the way through relentless touring and word-of-mouth buzz. NPR praised the band’s songwriting as a “delicate dance between heartache and resolve,” while Rolling Stone hailed their catalog as “folk music for Sunday mornings, quiet evenings, and all the fragile moments in between.” The duo’s most recent album, 2019’s Finch, marked a turning point in their career, pushing their sound to experimental new heights as it wrestled with notions of masculinity and religion and transformation in deeper, more personal ways than ever before. The record debuted at #2 on the Billboard Heatseekers Chart and was met with a rapturous response from critics and audiences alike, racking up more than 40 million streams on Spotify and earning the band their biggest headline tour to date.

Lera Lynn

With her new album On My Own, Lynn has emerged not only with a clear vision of herself, but with an entirely self-propelled breakthrough: Lynn wrote, sang, produced and recorded On My Own alone. She also played every single instrument on the record. It is a magnificent album, haunting and wild. It is also a record that no one else could make, because no one else is Lera Lynn. “I think there is something special about a singular vision,” Lynn says. “That’s not to say there’s not something special about a shared vision, a collaborative vision. But I would be so thrilled to hear records made in isolation by my favorite artists, just to know what their uninfluenced vision of their music is.” She pauses, then adds, “I guess I just wanted to hear what my own imagination sounded like.”

Lynn has earned a loyal following, critical acclaim and the admiration of peers and heroes. She first came to international attention through her writing and performances on HBO’s True Detective. Throughout her career, nearly a decade-long run filled with four album releases and hundreds of shows on both sides of the Atlantic, Lynn has maintained her fierce independence and dedication to her fans.

Her latest On My Own Deluxe is available where music is consumed.

Lera Lynn

With her new album On My Own, Lynn has emerged not only with a clear vision of herself, but with an entirely self-propelled breakthrough: Lynn wrote, sang, produced and recorded On My Own alone. She also played every single instrument on the record. It is a magnificent album, haunting and wild. It is also a record that no one else could make, because no one else is Lera Lynn. “I think there is something special about a singular vision,” Lynn says. “That’s not to say there’s not something special about a shared vision, a collaborative vision. But I would be so thrilled to hear records made in isolation by my favorite artists, just to know what their uninfluenced vision of their music is.” She pauses, then adds, “I guess I just wanted to hear what my own imagination sounded like.”

Over the last decade, Lynn has earned a loyal following, critical acclaim and the admiration of peers and heroes, the last of which propelled the brilliance of her last full- length release, 2018’s duets project Plays Well with Others. Several years earlier, the Nashville-based Lynn had turned heads in LA and she began writing music for the second season of HBO’s True Detective, on which she also landed a recurring role. Versatile and smart, she has sometimes seemed too good at too much.

On My Own harnesses all of that energy into a single potent focus. Album opener “Are You Listening?” begins with palpable urgency, building anticipation for Lynn’s svelte voice. Lynn doesn’t disappoint: “As a child I would dream of the bottom of the sea / If I swam deep enough, there was air to breathe,” she sings, launching into a reconnection with childlike faith in possibility. “It’s taking control of your destiny and deciding how you’re going to interpret the things that are happening around you,” Lynn says.

David Ramirez

How do you write love songs when you’re heartbroken? How do you sing about hope and passion when yours is lost? How do you finish an album when the relationship that inspired it has ended?

During the Summer of 2017, David Ramirez had fallen in love with a woman who, despite having only just met, felt incredibly familiar to him. There was a scary but comfortable feeling of deja vu within their moments together. “In past relationships, no matter how eager I was to feel loved and to give love, there had always been a hesitation to crawl out of my old life. I didn’t feel this with her,” he recollects.

Ramirez began to pen songs for his next album and hopeful odes to new love spilled out. Songs like “Lover, Will You Lead Me?” filled with vivid images from the heart: I recognized you from some distant dream / Like when it rains on a cold day / I had a chill in my bones / Is it true what they say / “When you know, you know.”

These were followed by sultry, romantic ballads about how love matures and grows. He wrote “I Wanna Live In Your Bedroom” while sitting on his lover’s bed just minutes after waking up on a hazy fall day. “I was looking around at all the perfectly curated pieces in her room,” he says. “Everything was so intentional and held a story and a place in her heart. I wanted to be one of those pieces.”

One after another, Ramirez poured his soul into a new work of art that covered both the sweet parts of love and the hard times it can bring. He wrote about potential, survival, hope, and encouragement. He wrote about partnership.

But art is often bred from spontaneity and suffers under the confines of routines and borders. This is a conflicting dynamic that can cause massive problems when you’re building a partnership, when you’re part of a team. A seeming “whatever” attitude can foster insecurity and doubt in a lover. As more and more troubles emerged in his relationship, Ramirez found solace still at the tip of his pen, holding his guitar, sitting at his piano.

“I was born in August of 1983 just days after Hurricane Alicia had hit my hometown of Houston. As my relationship began ripping at the seams, I started to think of this storm as a precursor to my being born,” Ramirez confides. “Was there something in the universe that imprinted a characteristic of chaos in my blood during my last few days in the womb? Was I destined to wreak havoc everywhere I went?”

Soon, the relationship that had inspired a new burst of creativity in Ramirez and moved him to start writing an album unlike any he had ever attempted before, came to an end. And with that ending, he still had one last song to write. His heart exhausted, he sat on his patio one night and tried to process all of the lyrics that he knew he had written, yet now left him feeling like a stranger to his own story. Through tears and muffled whimpers, he started to write down all of his negative thoughts about love and put the pain of his broken heart into words. From this emotional purge, he began to see the beauty in what he had gone through: the struggle, the pain, the confusion. He soon found himself writing the lyrics that would become album standout “Hallelujah, Love Is Real!”

“I was reminded of a great line in the film Vanilla Sky, ‘The sweet is never as sweet without the sour.’ I decided to celebrate Love,” he explains. “I wasn’t gonna write about how it made me feel in that moment. I was going to write about its existence and how thankful I am having known it.”

This chapter of Ramirez’s life came to a close in the form of his forthcoming 10-song set, My Love Is A Hurricane, recorded with producer Jason Burt at Modern Electric Studios in Dallas, TX. For the first time in his career, he did no pre-production ahead of time, working from gut feelings throughout the process and spending most of his time in the studio on the edge of his seat. The resulting R&B-influenced, piano-driven production is highlighted by heavy basslines and synths with the occasional gospel backing. This experimentation with new melodies and rhythms places Ramirez’s deeply personal songwriting on top of dreamy, groove-driven landscapes that heal the heart and promote positivity while prompting listeners to want to sing (and dance) along.

My Love Is A Hurricane is Ramirez’s fifth full-length record and eighth collection of songs. Early albums like American Soil (2009) and Apologies (2012) put him on the map both locally and beyond, while his STRANGETOWN (2011) and The Rooster (2013) EPs delivered fan-favorite recordings, “Shoeboxes” and “The Bad Days respectively, that are staple singalongs at his concerts to this day. He made his Thirty Tigers debut with 2015’s FABLES, produced by Noah Gundersen, which features his most widely received single to date, “Harder to Lie.” While this earlier work landed Ramirez firmly in the singer/songwriter canon, a need to do more exploring sonically led to the expansive sound of his most recent album, We’re Not Going Anywhere (2017). Influenced by ‘80s bands like The Cars and Journey, it is lyrically reflective of the country’s intense political landscape framed from his perspective as a bi-racial American of Mexican heritage.

As songwriters evolve as people, so does their art, and that could not be more apparent than on Ramirez’s newest offering. The soundscapes utilized on My Love Is A Hurricane may be unlike any recording he has previously crafted, but it’s not a departure from his journey. It’s a new path created in order to tell a new story. A new canvas needed to hold the scene that his intensely personal lyrics are painting.

Lera Lynn – Plays Well With Others

Throughout her career — a nearly decade-long run filled with three album releases, a career-shifting appearance and soundtrack for HBO’s True Detective, hundreds of shows on both sides of the Atlantic, and a sound encompassing everything from Americana to stark indie rock — Lera Lynn has balanced her fierce independence with a string of collaborations. 

She’s written songs with T Bone Burnett and Rosanne Cash. She’s recorded albums with full bands (2014’s The Avenues, hailed by outlets like Rolling Stone and American Songwriter) and smaller lineups (the experimental, NPR and New York Times-approved Resistor, which Lynn co-produced at her Nashville home). On her fourth album, Plays Well With Others, she teams up with eight different duet partners and seven co-writers, resulting in her most diverse, collaborative work to date. 

Plays Well With Others is a unique duets album — one in which nearly every song is completely co-written and co-sung. Peter Bradley Adams, John Paul White, Dylan LeBlanc, Andrew Combs, Rodney Crowell, Shovels & Rope, JD McPherson, and Nicole Atkins all make appearances, working alongside Lynn not only to perform these songs, but to create them, too. 

“Songwriting can be such a personal process; in the past I have tended to do it alone,” Lynn admits. “With this record, I wanted to get outside of my own writing corner. I have access to a great community of writers and singers in Nashville, and it became an exciting challenge to sit down with some friends and say, ‘Let’s write a duet — one that maybe hasn’t been written before — and then record it together.’ This was an important thing for me to do as an artist: to open myself up to other people and have some fun.”

Lynn recorded Plays Well With Others at John Paul White’s studio, Sun Drop Sound, in Florence, Alabama. There — with Lynn, White, and the Alabama Shakes’ Ben Tanner all serving as co-producers — she tracked nine songs in a series of live takes. Looking to add some sonic framework to an album whose tracklist was vast and varied, she only used acoustic instruments, layering upright piano, strings, percussion, acoustic guitars, and creative sounds into arrangements that nodded to artists like Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Neil Young, John Lennon and Tom Petty. The result is an album that’s at times more stripped-down than The Avenues and far less amplified than Resistor, while still shining a light on Lynn’s striking voice and unique blend of American music.

Appropriately, the nine songs on Plays Well With Others tackle issues of the heart, from love to lust to loss. On the album’s haunting opener, “Same Old Song,” Lynn and Peter Bradley Adams swap harmonies from opposite sides of a broken relationship, both trying to summon up the courage to sever ties completely. “What is Love” — a gorgeous folk song recorded with Dylan LeBlanc — finds its two singers questioning their own worth, while the Rodney Crowell collaboration “Crimson Underground” unfolds like a conversation between the self and the voice of temptation. There’s also a coed cover of TV on the Radio’s “Wolf Like Me,” performed with Shovels & Rope; a tribute to the glory days of 1960s Roy Orbison with Nicole Atkins; a kinetic, psychedelic “Breakdown” with Andrew Combs; and a pair of duets with John Paul White, who first sang with Lynn during a handful of shared shows in 2017. 

“John’s a great vocalist and really great harmony singer, which makes him the perfect duet partner,” Lynn says of John Paul White, who kicked off his career as one-half of the Civil Wars. “During our tour together, we started covering ‘Almost Persuaded,’ which I’d heard Conway Twitty and many others perform. By the time we recorded the song, we’d also written ‘Lose Yourself’, which is a song about the love-strickens’ last attempt at retaining their fleeting individual identity. 

With Plays Well With Others, Lera Lynn cements her own identity as both creator and collaborator. On an album filled with Grammy winners, country icons, folksingers, and Americana heroes, it’s still her star that shimmers the brightest, shining light on the newest phase of an eclectic, ever-expanding career.