Penny & Sparrow

A wise wizard once said: “when in doubt, always follow your nose.”

The last album from Penny and Sparrow, Olly Olly, was a work of revelation and liberation. A search for and an embrace of the self. I imagine they were left with a head scratcher of a question: well, shit. Where do you go from there? Fortunately, they listened to the wizard and followed their noses backwards to find their way forward. Aiming to strip away pretense and invite experimentation, they commandeered a garden shed from a friend and retrofitted it to make a twenty-track album that is vast, weird, and wholly unexpected. If Lefty is anything, it is the journal of Penny and Sparrow’s inner child. Dog-eared, lock busted open. On its pages the sketches of dreams, nightmares, erotica, and literary fanfiction graffiti the margins of poetry, elegies, and love letters in the wild colors of saxophone blue, electronic pink, and blood harmony red. Beautifully varied and richly rendered, it is an album that wanders from theme to theme, style to style, exultation to tragedy. Yet it is never lost. If anything, it is at play. United by its intimate vocals and aching harmonies, its acoustic laments trickle into ethereal pop only to surge into whimsical ballads and crest into grand hooligan anthems that sway gently down to familiar shores where melancholic ballads tell of love lost, found, forgotten, and remembered. Andy and Kyle have written some albums in blood. Others they’ve whispered to the sea. This one they danced in the sky with smiles on their faces. Lefty feels like not just a celebration of their journey beyond the bounds of their traditional genre, but as if they have rediscovered the joy in music by honoring the sounds that inspired two boys growing up in Texas to one day make the damn stuff themselves.

- Pierce Brown, author and friend

Nashville singer/songwriter Erin Rae and her group the Meanwhiles emerged in 2012 with a sound rooted in dreamy indie folk, Americana, and '70s pop/rock. Rae issued her minimalist solo debut, Putting on Airs, in 2018, followed in 2022 by the dynamic, retro-pop, and country-leaning Lighten Up.

Born and raised in Jackson, Tennessee, Erin Rae McKaskle grew up in a musical home. Her family eventually relocated to Nashville, and it was there that Rae picked up her first six-string and began writing songs. Influenced by distinctive roots music artists like Bobbie Gentry, Lee Hazlewood, and Don Williams, she formed Erin Rae & the Meanwhiles in the early 2010s. The group issued their debut EP, Crazy Talk, in 2011, followed by their well-received first full-length effort, Soon Enough, four years later. Rae dropped the Meanwhiles ahead of the arrival of her sophomore effort, 2018's Putting on Airs. Her first outing for John Paul White's Single Lock label, the LP earned acclaim for its catchy melodic turns and intimate ruminations on life, love, and loss. In 2021, Rae enlisted producer/artist Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Billy Strings) to help deliver her most vibrant set of songs to date. Released the following year, Lighten Up added elements of light psychedelia, indie pop, and cosmic country to Rae's sonic arsenal. "Rich Man," a bonus track from those same sessions, was issued later that year as a single. ~ James Christopher Monger, Rovi