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 headscratcher 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 fan fiction 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

AURALAI

Auralai (Stephanie Russell) a classically trained cellist of 20 years that reinvented her craft after leaving the classical music scene. Stephanie fell in love with cello in elementary school and was trained in after-school string lessons, private instruction, and youth orchestra. She performed in several bands post-graduation before forming “Auralai”—originally a three-piece acoustic indie outfit (2013). Auralai went on to become a cello-driven indie pop duo in 2015 with multi-instrumentalist Nate Lehner and released two albums in 2015 and 2016, with a third set to release in 2023. No slave to conventional songwriting or classical cello form, Auralai’s unique brand of cello-pop brings a breath of fresh air to the contemporary music scene.