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PENNY & SPARROW - THE OH HELLOS - THE HEAD AND THE HEART - ALANNA-MARIE BOUDREAU
and if hope keeps you young and wild then if you please I’d lie to die as a child -P&S
8. JOSEPH
16. JENNY & TYLER
22. PENNY & SPARROW
28. THE OH HELLOS
36. THE HEAD AND THE HEART
44. ALANNA-MARIE BOUDREAU
I’m Alone, No You’re Not
Les Mis, Love, and Music
Signs of Light
Of This I’m Sure
C.S. Lewis, Faith, and Music
Champion
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Annalise Domenighini
PENNY & SPARROW LES MIS, LOVE, AND MUSIC
WE ASKED ANDY BAXTER WHERE THE SOUL of new album Let A Lover Drown You came from, and why he loves Les Miserables so much. When I call Andy Baxter, one half of the duo that is Penny and Sparrow, he’s in Kansas City staying with some friends on his way to the Folk Alliance Music Festival, a festival dedicated to blues, bluegrass, roots, Celtic, Cajun, Appalachian, traditional, and world music, to hang out and play at the hotel where the festival is at. A!er dark, he tells me, all the rooms in the hotel become their own venues. Occupants remove the furniture, set up small stages, keep the doors open, and play acoustic sets of their music. Penny and Sparrow is a duo—Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke—from Austin, Texas who are helping to revive modern Americana with their so! sound and heart-wrenching lyrics about modern day life, traveling, and, every once in awhile, Les Miserables. Baxter is a huge fan of the story.
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024 | November 2016
Let A Lover Drown You is their third album, and might be their saddest yet. I asked Andy what went into it, where the soul of it came from, and also why he loves Les Miserables so very much. Listen to their album while you read it. What’s different about this album, from the last two albums? I know that this is the one that’s officially cementing your career as musicians. What changed between the last and this album that inspired this one? There’s a bunch of things. One, this one, unlike the others, was wri"en— not entirely, but almost entirely—on the road. The meat of a lot of this was wri"en while we were touring on the last one, and we were just excited about it. Joy is an amazing fuel. Being able to be excited and realizing, “Oh my God, we’re really doing this, we’re musicians. Holy shit!” And ge"ing to take that fuel and turn it into songwriting was one thing. That’s a huge difference is just where we wrote it and the mindset with which we wrote it. This is the first full-time album. We didn’t have any other jobs while we were writing this one. That’s one difference. You mentioned you were writing with joy, but listening to the album it felt like a very bi#er album. Just generally bi#er and disappointed. Was there any of that in the songwriting? I mean, there’s days like that in humanity in general. While we tour, there’s days of figuring out... like this last tour is the first one that we’d ever gone that far away from home. We toured for over two months. And so because of that two straight months of being on the road and living
out of a suitcase... and we didn’t have a lease on a house for over a year. And this is just when we were trying to figure out, “Oh my God, we’re really going to do this, let’s give it a shot, let’s see what happens.” And so that brought a whole bunch of growing pains. But as you can probably tell from talking to me—and you would with any other subsequent conversations—I’m a pre"y happy person, a pre"y happy guy. And although the things that inspire me a lot of the times are serious in nature, it’s not a direct reflection of exactly what’s going to go into all the music. I think we write about hope deferred a lot because that idea is fascinating and I think that idea is an innately human one that we all have to deal with. And so we try and say really true things in difficult ways, in ways that we hadn’t heard them done before. And I think you’re hearing a lot of that in this album. Can you expand on what you mean by writing about hope deferred and your interest in it? Sure. Someone asked us the other day, “Is there a thread that ties all of these songs together in this album?” And I was thinking about it before... thankfully I got to type that one up so I had time to ruminate on it before I just ran my mouth. But what I se"led on was that this whole album asks you to look at every one of the loves you’ve ever had in your life and really examine them with an honest pen, as objectively as you can a grading rubric. And I guess our hope is that people would look at the type of love that they take in in their life, and in doing so they would be able to be like, “Hey, what am I subjecting myself to that I don’t need to, that’s unhealthy? And maybe just maybe I’m neck deep in a love that’s bullshit and I don’t need to be anymore. And maybe just maybe I’m a shit ton more than I give myself credit for and I don’t need to subject myself to this any longer.” And so there’s songs on there that are about great love worth waiting for; there’s songs on there that are about really tough love that needs to be avoided; there’s a song on there that’s entirely about being cornered in a party by an ex-lover who throws themselves at you and you have to remind yourself and them that you’re over them, that you’re through. So I think we examined that idea throughout the entire album. It’s like, each one is a tiny glass case with a different lover in it that you have to look at and examine and hopefully learn from. And I think in that—for us anyway—there’s a mourning period where you realise what you’ve put yourself through in the past and what you might currently be pu"ing yourself through. But there’s also a great deal of hope in the sense that I don’t have to stay that way.
TOP: Creature BOTTOM LEFT: Tenboom BOTTOM RIGHT: Struggle Pre!y
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What made you want to reflect on love? I don’t know. I would love to say that there’s a clear-cut defining moment that I chose to, but this album came quicker, I think, than the other ones did. We’re proud of everything that we’ve done. There’s no lack of pride in our earlier stuff compared to now. It almost just feels like in the painting world we have more color options than we did in the past because we’ve go"en be"er at music, go"en be"er [as] songwriters, etcetera. So it’s not like old songs are shit and new songs are good. If anything we just feel be"er at our jobs and, for whatever reason, during the season of life that we were touring, I was thinking a ton about that. There’s a song on the album called “Catalog” that I think, without meaning to, becomes almost a thesis statement for the album even though it’s track 3. I feel like it surmises an overlook at the whole album. There’s no sickening hardship that I was going through at that time—none of us were. Yeah, the road was hard and we were figuring out how to do it, but it was mostly fantastic and mostly full of joy. For whatever reason—maybe the things that I was reading or the things that I was listening to at the time— that thought and my past versus this incredible marriage that I find myself in now, I was just thinking about that a lot. And I was grateful, and I was heartsick for what I used to subject myself to. So I think I wrote out of that reservoir a lot. But I’m sure there’s a thousand other things that I can’t even dredge up in my memory that were my inspirations along the way.
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What influenced your style of music? I know that you’re from Austin and you listen to a lot of underground folk, but you guys seem to carve out a different sound than the usual Americana or the usual country-gospel. I think it goes back to that quote by Kyle. I think we have never put limits on what we digest in terms of art, and so all of that comes through. There’s lyric inspiration from all the expected genres that you would think of that we would listen to. Yeah, we like James Vincent McMorrow. Yes, we like Simon & Garfunkel. We like all of that stuff that would almost make sense that we like. And then past that there’s a ton of music that’s sort of weird that’s been inspirational. Pa"i Page; old school gospel; James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir. There’s a bunch of things that we draw from that don’t fit in our genre at all, but are incredibly inspirational along the way. I think what influenced most our style was a big brother of ours who writes books and said, “Hey, just write the type of music you’d want to listen to, and when that changes, change with it.” And so we’re trying to do that and we’ve tried to do that all along the way which is pre"y cool. It makes it easier to be proud of your music.
I wanted to ask you about the final song on your album, “Eponine.” She’s a famous literary character in Les Miserables and famous in Greek mythology too. Absolutely, she’s an inspiration. There’s a few things in your life that you really hope... So if someone ever asks you what’s your dream Jeopardy category, I think my dream Jeopardy category right now in life would probably be the 10th Anniversary cast of Les Miserables. I can tell you who sang in it, I can tell you who played who. I can tell you who they brought back for the 20th Anniversary edition. I can tell you the crossovers. I can tell you why I love that musical. I know every line to that musical. And so we had another song on another album called “Valjean,” that was on Tenboom, then we had another song on the next album called “Fantine.” And I plan on doing a bit of an homage piece on every album that we do. What is it about Les Miserables that gets you? Oh God. You don’t have enough time. But for a small thesis statement, I would say that I love the idea that a character that is completely deplorable can be brought back from that. I love that Eponine individually is the most heart-wrenching sacrificial character that I can think of in a lot of literature. And I love very very much her role and how tragic it is for her, to see the love of her life never really reciprocate that, and have to deal with that. And yet in the same breath to love him enough to give her life for him. I just think it’s fantastic. I eat the entire story with a spoon. They’re so rich, the characters are, and I think it’s a great cross-section of the human heart. I think we are, at different times, every one of those characters, from deplorable and mangy all the way up to damn near honorable and noble. I love love love that musical so much. I agree. I feel like whenever I watch it or read about it I learn something completely new, or I see something completely new, or identify with something. I think no ma#er what you’re going through, there’s always a character in there that you identify with, like you said. I completely agree. A few years ago I had a dream. We were in New York for my birthday, we were playing a show up there, and Kyle Scatliff (who plays Enjolras in the last cast, before they just revamped it)—he had come to our show with his girlfriend, invited us to see Les Mis the next day. We go, we get to go backstage, I get to meet Ramine Karimloo who plays Valjean at the time, we get to sing with him backstage. It was like a complete dream come true and I freaked out all over the dude. It was awesome.
I would like to know a li#le bit about the title. It’s an album that has such a wide range of love stories. Okay, so let’s take—because we were just on her life, we’ll talk about her a li"le bit more—so if you look at the life of Eponine, you think about the various meanings of the word ‘drown’ and what can that mean. I think that at its worst, bad love feels abusive and it feels like a drowning. At its best, you’re willing to die and be sacrificial for someone you love. And everything in between. I feel like good love spans the spectrum of that at all times. Be"er yet, honest love spans the spectrum of feeling like blue collar, nine-to-five work that you’ve go"a clock in for and... when we write about love I feel like every single time we’re trying to allude to the fact that maybe the best type of love imaginable is the type without an escape hatch. The type that you look at somebody and say, “Hey, no ma"er what, I’ve seen you at your shi"iest and I’m not leaving and I’m not going anywhere; I’m intimately acquainted with your garbage and I’m still stuck.” And I think that’s really really cool and I think it’s available, so I like to sing about it and we like to write about it.
“...maybe the best type of love imaginable is the type without an escape hatch.”
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028 | November 2016
Stephanie Grey
THE OH HELLOS C.S. LEWIS, FAITH, AND MUSIC THE OH HELLOS, A BROTHER-SISTER DUO turned ten-piece band, are bringing their Celticinfluenced style to venues around the U.S. this winter. Identified by harrowing vocals, somber strings, and celebratory eruptions of drum and choral cheers, the Oh Hellos captivate listeners with intensely emotional harmonies and a timeless, rustic allure. Maggie Heath’s vocals compel in a manner that warrants single track a"ention.
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The Oh Hellos’ debut album, Through the Deep Dark Valley, was born of family roots, intimate memories and personal ideas on love, growth and identity — wri"en, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by siblings Tyler and Maggie Heath. The sophomore album, Dear Wormwood, however, had many more hands on deck. The album demonstrates a progression in depth and an expansion in the lyric writing to include perspectives outside that of the singer. Somewhat of a concept album, Dear Wormwood was inspired by character interplays and metaphors drawn from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Le!ers. The resulting collective is a musical refurnishing of a literary classic, cleverly developing the perspective of under-explored characters. Westword spoke to the Heath siblings to learn more about the inspiration behind the album, as well as a few of the meanings and themes that they hope resonate with listeners.
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In earlier interviews, it seemed that prior to your debut album, you guys were quite reluctant to go into the music industry professionally. What were some of your biggest concerns at that time? MAGGIE: Well at that time, we had just seen, I don’t know, a lot of the bands that we discovered in an early stage; we watched them be taken advantage of suddenly and be put in a constraining box. Once they started signing with labels, they didn’t really understand what they were about, and I guess for us, it was all that we maintained the control over... especially the creative process, and how we presented our music to different people. TYLER: And in the beginning, it was about freedom. Because we didn’t even know how long we even wanted to make music, and at the time, it wasn’t even [wanted] professionally. We didn’t know how to pursue this and keep our options open and be able to walk away and be in a position we where we had to ‘not sign a contract for three albums.’ We didn’t know how things worked, and our assumptions about how we thought things worked.... But it was basically all about freedom and the ability to kind of stay in charge of our own course. That’s been important to us, and that was what we thought the best way to go about it at the time was.
What’s been the biggest surprise about making that decision — to become a “famous” band? TYLER: It’s fla"ering you would call us a “famous” band! I don’t know, something has changed. We’ve loosened a li"le bit about how willing we are to work with other people. For the longest time, we didn’t even have a manager. MAGGIE: I think a lot of what changed was we had a lot of opportunity meeting people in the industry while doing various jobs, like management and booking, labels and all that sort of stuff. There were plenty of people who were basically like what we expected, but we also met so many people who were clearly just as excited about the music and artists that they were working with... It was kind of a breath of fresh air, to realize it wasn’t all some “money-making guy.” TYLER: It is encouraging to see that there are mostly just people in the music industry. That it is less of a machine than we really feared. Maggie mentioned that she knew the artists that [they] represented, and we ended up working with those artists. So we really got to be a part of how the music reached new people and grow. I guess we are a li"le bit protective of the music and our ability to make decisions, but there definitely has been a shi! in our ability — weren’t we just talking about that? Our willingness to delegate or willingness to expand? As far as being “protective’”of the music initially, when it was just the two of you: How has such a large number of musicians changed that process? Can you compare the process of composing the first album to Dear Wormwood, now that you’re a much larger ensemble? MAGGIE: Well, we write new music all the time... It is just Tyler and I writing and arranging and figuring all the parts and stuff. The thing that was really great about it was we would really shape the ideas that we first brought to the band to perform. So much of it changed with the live part that they’re basically two separate creatures. When we wrote Dear Wormwood, it was the same thing. When we brought it to the band we had that clear idea of “This is what we’re thinking” and the emotions. It just really allowed everyone to just know what we were trying to say, and then be able to speak it through their own voice and be able to make it their own. TYLER: Yeah, like we started with our idea and our vision and built upwards from there. I think the primary difference between the recordings and the live show is... it gets a li"le bit more chaotic, as there is everyone there contributing. But I think the main difference is just that the live show is hugely energetic and intense and explosive. And I think the flip-side of that is also touring with musicians that understand the quiet and intimate, intricate and delicate side of what we are trying to do.
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Dear Wormwood is almost a concept album, as you’ve shared that it was influenced by The Screwtape Le!ers. What was compelling about that story in particular and inspired you to elaborate upon it? What was missing from it, in your eyes? TYLER: So honestly, I don’t know that off the top of my head. My thought process was just that story was such a great lens through which to put my own ideas personally. And it fit so well with what both of us were writing. This is a really interesting concept, to write le"ers.... I’m only realizing now that, as a book, everything is in double-speak: Everything that Screwtape says is bad is good. And everything he does that’s good is bad. The double-speak was talking about this obviously unhealthy relationship — this tormentor figure — but couching it all in this very affectionate, very lovey-dovey way. It hadn’t even occurred to me that we had done that. Maybe that was our intention? Or I didn’t know we did that intentionally. But I mean, I didn’t know how nicely that worked. For me it was just a really interesting perspective, or interesting mechanism, for a way to tell the story. Is there any song on the album that means the most to each of you? TYLER: For me, it’s “Tyrants.” But that’s at least as much because it’s the last song on the album as it is because it’s the one that’s most special to me. I must like the sense of wrapping things up. I hate when a story ends, because at the same time, that means that you’re done with the story, but there’s that really satisfactory, cathartic sense that there is an ending. It was a fun song to write and record, and also a fun writing process. It was very cathartic to finish and wrap up the whole album as well. MAGGIE: I would say “Soldier” [“Soldier, Poet, King”]. Because that song is supposed to be a fairly easy song to sing along to, like folk songs you can relate to throughout this awesome life and times. It’s a song that we can all sing together and keep moving forward and sing to, even though it’s the darkest times. And keep moving forward together.
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With lyrics such as “flesh to flesh” and “children of Eden,” for example — is faith something that consciously comes up in your music? MAGGIE: It’s definitely intentional, yes. Tyler and I both grew up in the church and have spent time questioning our faith-upbringing, and kind of come around to, I guess, an understanding of what it is we truly believe. So when it came to our music, and wanting to write music from our heart, we do tend to use a lot of our biblical knowledge, or language of our childhood. We were wanting to write music that was sincere.... We never really pinned ourselves as a Christian band, because that kind of connotes “music wri"en for Christians, by Christians, and that is just for Christians.” If you’re not a Christian, then you won’t relate to that, and that’s not we’re trying to do. TYLER: Yeah, and we just wanted to write music that comes from a personal place inside of us, and we just wanted to be able to make it resonate with anyone. MAGGIE: We are all human, and we all share the same story. Well, not the same story, but the same pieces of the story. So it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of Christian blogs or radios want to talk about us. TYLER: We appreciate people are picking up on that, but at the same time, we try not to be so overt about it that it scares people away. We want to keep the music accessible and, I guess, as universal as we can. So, yeah, it’s in there on purpose.
KATIE FITZGERALD - ARTS 403 - FALL 2016