Two Runner

Amid the excitement and ambiguity of a new start, Paige Anderson of Two Runner poses poignant questions on Porchlight, her resolute and tenderhearted new record. Beautiful string arrangements, intimate confessionals, and rollicking hymns for the lost and determined, here is an artist who’s been on the road consistently since early childhood - with persistence and commitment to her craft clearly in no short supply.

Porchlight offers tunes that are warm and steady, relatable nostalgia twinged with the ache of needing to move on. The result aptly links the uncertainty of letting go and simultaneous resolve of someone faced with no other choice. A destiny perhaps sealed from an early age, as Anderson began her touring career in a six-person family bluegrass band from the age of nine. Now nearly a decade into her own music career, she’s seen stages warming up for Sierra Ferrell, Watchhouse and Molly Tuttle.

Although change often comes en masse, it is surreal and jarring to start again. Paige Anderson offers Two Runner as solace and escape for those needing to reset, with sage comfort and kindness from her own accounts, the way all great songwriters do. Porchlight is perhaps best summed up by the chorus in track five, ‘Mocking Crow’: “Wake up tomorrow, there’s no in between - your heart knows what you need.” A reckoning, a stark look in the mirror, hope, and forward movement against all odds.

Daniel Young is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, drummer, sound engineer, and producer from Salt Lake City. He grew up on the side of a tall mountain, and that sense of forceful elevation informs all of his work. Daniel's been recording and performing for over two decades—and he's not that old, which tells you much of what you need to know about his commitment to craft, about how deep this runs with him.

There's a heft to the light in the early evening, when every easterly surface shines. That mayfly incandescence, where nothing gold can stay, though it might flash long enough for you to touch its flaming tail. That's the light Daniel Young captures on Another Golden Hour: it was absorbed on the side patio where the songs were born, carried to the basement where they were magnetized, and it's now refracted back to the air around our heads, where those same songs will fade and be reborn. A small resurrection, a rotational miracle; another day, another golden hour. Recorded at Orchard Studios over a two-day session with only a handful of overdubs, Young worked once again with the Rambling Roses, the same crew he had along for 2024's Leave It Out to Dry. They achieve a rare merger of time, texture, and temperament—a unity that miraculously preserves the uncanny elements of each component.

These songs extend Young's abiding interests—and the crazy quilt of his life and times: "Baby, Baby Blue" is a tribute to the dearly departed KSOP (AM 1370), a seventy-year veteran of the good fight of country music and its amplitude modulations; "Holdin' Up" is an earnest question issued to the new depression; "Fires Shall Be Ceased" and "Ways to Communicate" draw on the righteous, rangy energy of a protest tradition that reaches back to Woody Guthrie and the ghosts of Joe Hill that haunt the Wasatch; the title cut is a wavey, dripping distillation of all the sounds that have been trailing Young over the years. Another Golden Hour is a bid for hard-earned hope. You better believe it.