Olympia, WA-based experimental indie-folk duo The Lowest Pair — Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee — are set to return with a new full-length, The Perfect Plan, on April 24, 2020 via Delicata Records / Thirty Tigers. After each releasing solo albums via Conor Oberst’s Team Love Records in 2018, Winter and Lee tapped producer Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes to help expand simple folk songs into fleshed-out soundscapes that lean gently into Winter's punk past, as well as the sonic playground of her mind. Album standout “Wild Animals” (out today) combines the duo’s atmospheric tones and dynamic, mantra-like vocals with impressive clawhammer banjo work backing Winter's poetic lyrical imagery. Of the track, Winter offers:
"'Wild Animals' is about following curiosity and intrigue into the mysterious places that they can take you, being both frightened and excited by a wilder side, internally or externally, and not wanting to return to normalcy after experiencing the ecstatic, all the while trying to hold steady."
In celebration of the new record, The Lowest Pair will live stream a performance for the online folk festival Shut In & Sing — organized by singer/songwriter Natalia Zukerman and Hangin' & Sangin' host Kelly McCartney in response to COVID-19 self-isolation efforts — on April 26 at 2:30pm EDT. An intimate performance meant to inspire innovation and connection through isolation is a fitting, if imperfect, stage for the release of The Perfect Plan, as Winter and Lee each experimented with different isolation techniques in order to refuel their creative energies after recording the album. Winter journeyed to Antarctica to work within a small community at a scientific research station; and while there, she won the Annual South Pole Marathon in -36 degrees, at a pressure altitude of 10,300 feet, setting a new record time in the competition for women. She says that being at “the bottom of the world” is the first time she’s “held still” in a while.
As Winter headed south, Lee went north to a small, wooded cabin in the Driftless hills of Wisconsin for an isolated writer’s residency where his lessons in presence involved lots of wood chopping and water carrying. He explains, “My objective wasn’t necessarily a list of goals or things I wanted to create, but to learn to observe my process — the way I live and how it lines up against the way I want to live — to learn more about the way I construct a day and could construct a day.”
Whether together in the studio or thousands of miles apart, Winter and Lee are two sides of the same coin whose experiences define and support each other. And The Lowest Pair harness and harmonize that wisdom in The Perfect Plan as a way of distilling the magic of their partnership into a singular tangible experience that speaks to audiences across genres.
The Perfect Plan Track Listing:
1) How Far I Would Go
2) Too Late Babe
3) Wild Animals
4) Shot Down the Sky
5) Cast Away
6) Morning Light
7) We Are Bleeding
8) Enemy of Ease
9) Take What You Can Get
10) The Perfect Plan
The Lowest Pair On Tour:
April 26 — Shut In & Sing — Live Stream @ 2:30pm EDT
May 29-30 — Steamboat Stringband Jamboree — Olympia, WA
June 3 — SPACE — Evanston, IL
June 4 — Turf Club — Minneapolis, MN
June 5 — The Winnebago — Madison, WI
June 6 — Bonfire Music and Arts Festival — Hillsboro, WI
June 7 — Sacred Heart Center — Duluth, MN
