The Lowest Pair – “Keweenaw Flower” / “When They Dance the Mountains Shake” (premiere)

The Lowest Pair‘s two members, Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee spent the winter of 2015 in the cold and ice of Minnesota composing and playing new songs for a planned record in spring of 2016. Those sessions proved to be so fertile that the duo wound up with far more songs than they expected and the tunes seemed to fit naturally into two separate releases. So, Winter and Lee decided to put out two simultaneous albums on Team Love Records, Fern Girl and Ice Man and Uncertain As It Is Uneven. Uncertain As It Is Uneven fits perfectly within their existing, known sound that features delicately constructed spare arrangements melded with gorgeous vocals and harmonies. Meanwhile, Fern Girl and Ice Man finds the group experimenting a bit and creating a batch of songs that basically imagine being backed by a larger band. Regardless of the differences, both are stunning records with really beautiful melodies and instrumentation and they work ideally as a duo, just like the Lowest Pair themselves.

Fern Girl and Ice Man and Uncertain As It Is Uneven release digitally on April 15th and on CD/LP May 27th via Team Love.

Lee says of “Keweenaw Flower” from Uncertain As It Is Uneven that “Keweenaw Flower came as a natural flood from an experience in a day. The song and I not being related at all, just a story born from being tossed between heaviness and inspiration. I was staying in Minneapolis for a month last summer which was a rare occasion for me in the last few years to be any one place for a month, let alone home. My general experience that month was a juxtaposition of sweetness and awkwardness. It was as if, to quote a friend of mine, I’d been gone for so long that I didn’t know how to be in one place. That morning I’d been listening to a Bruce Molsky record on my headphones all the way to the coffee shop and back. Replaying a few ballads over and over again and feeling really connected with those sentiments of longing and inspired by the beauty of the story telling. I got home, started writing, started singing, started playing, and this tune worked it’s self out over the course of that day. Being the sort of song that it turned out to be, the process was an emotional shoulder rub.”

Meanwhile, Winter tells us that Fern Girl and Ice Man‘s “‘When They Dance the Mountains Shake’ is a homage to the badass creative ladies in my life. I’m constantly inspired and lucky to be supported by my girlfriends and women everywhere who challenge conventional beauty standards, roles, and expectations of what it means to be “refined”.