These songs arrive quietly, then stay.
Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee, the duo known as The Lowest Pair, have quietly built one of the most thoughtful catalogs in modern Americana music. Always As Young As We’ll Ever Be, the band’s eighth album, produced by Tucker Martine, is their first in six years, and the brilliant poetry within reflects the careful attention to their craft.
Ahead of a month-long European tour, their first since before a global pandemic, Winter and Lee spoke with us about their writing practices and how songs change once they leave the room where they were written.
Analogue: You’re ready to hit Europe for the next month. How are you feeling about that?
Kendl Winter: Ooh, great question. History is we've been over in the UK twice. We've played the Shetland Island Folk Festival and some other festivals in Scotland. And then we've toured in the UK twice, but all before COVID. And the tours were good. I remember having a nice time. We've never played in Europe before. I think it's starting. I think we're going to have some mixed excitement-slash-anxiety.
Palmer T. Lee: 48 hours out. Yeah, we're just like, I don't know if we're going to get all the things done.
Kendl: Just the logistics. You know, I think once we're there, it'll be incredible. Like once we're just kind of on the ground playing music and stuff. Right now, we're in the like crunch zone of making sure we have strings and the right electric conversion things. You know, we're in the weeds right now.
Analogue: I would imagine. I want to start with an impulse I had. I was so taken with so many lines on the new album. The imagery. The wordcraft. It felt like poetry first. I was curious if you are poets or if you’re into poetry at all? Am I way off?
Kendl: I love that. Yeah, I think we are both very much poets. We both have very regular writing practices on a pretty much daily basis. And Palmer, I think is more like attuned to like actually crafting a poem and, well, you’re a published poet.
Analogue: You are?
Palmer: Yeah, I do have a collection that was published a couple of years ago, a small company out of Wisconsin called Ramshackle Press.
"I think we are both very much poets. We both have very regular writing practices on a pretty much daily basis."
Kendl: We came together, I think, with that kind of wordsmithing being part of the intrigue. Both of us are avid readers and lovers of poetry.
Palmer: And poetry is actually kind of how I ended up songwriting, like snuck through the back door. I was doing some readings in high school and just found it to be a completely terrifying experience. At some point, I realized maybe I could try my hand at turning these things into songs, you know? Then I had this sort of magical force field of holding a guitar in front of me while I'm sharing these things with people. That's really kind of how I ended up getting into songwriting. A friend of mine was showing me some chords and we would jam. So, yeah, poetry is kind of how I got into the whole thing to begin with.
Kendl: Yeah, I think I was writing a lot too. I liked to sing, and my mom was like, ‘You could put that to like music. It could be a song.’ That's not exactly what she said, but it was also a little safer to sing or would feel a little less vulnerable to be behind an instrument.
Analogue: Do you have favorite poets?
Kendl: I think I landed on my early favorites like E.E. Cummings. I love his like play with punctuation and riddles.
Palmer: Mary Oliver, obviously. I've been really into Wendell Berry recently.
Kendl: Oh, but also Hafiz, like the Sufi poets, I think are a really big influence on both of us.
Palmer: Yeah, the Daniel Wittensky stuff.
Analogue: Let me ask about that. You said, ‘Yes, it's definitely a part of our craft. It's definitely how we got started.’ How do you know when to stop and let something be what it is, like not to wring it out anymore?
Kendl: That's a great question. Palmer's better at that than I am. You tend to like give something in there, then you're like, ‘No, that’s the way it is.’ I tend to be a little bit more of an editor. I do think going back to the pre-edited version sometimes has the most emotion in it, even though it might not be the most polished piece. Sometimes you can kind of accidentally polish the raw material away from what was important about it, and I think that probably our push and pull around that has been interesting.
Palmer: Yeah, sometimes I get a little hung up on feeling insecure, that maybe I'm just lazy and that's why I don't edit. Now if there's something that bothers me and I'll go in and polish that. But largely, if there's nothing that bothers me, I'll kind of like read through it two or three times. And if it feels good, it's done.
Analogue: Is that ever hard for the two of you to negotiate?
Kendl: I think it used to be a little bit more than it is. I think when we first started, we used to both be a little bit more bullheaded about it. At this point, I feel like it's it's less. I see the vision more or I have more openness to what the vision is. I think I used to think I was right a lot more.
Analogue: I wanted to ask about the forms, too. The feeling is so varied on the new album, Some songs are more conversational and wordy. Other succinct. Like poetry has so many varied forms and structures and it felt like that was true, too. Is that intentional?
Kendl: I don't know how intentional that was, except that I do think after a decade of putting records out, we're getting a little more exploratory. My like songs tend to really come out of whatever I'm exploring. There are a handful of songs from the record that are all on a new tuning that I had never tuned my guitar to before, and were birthed out of—probably an instrumental groove that I got behind and then let the poetry come from there. Which I do think that's really different, like if I'm writing on cowboy chords or if I'm writing in open tunings, really different kind of songs emerge.
Analogue: What's the best example of what you're talking about on the new album?
Kendl: “Tiny Rebellions” for sure. It’s maybe an outlier on the record, as they almost always have one like that. I could write those kinds of songs all day, every day. But I feel like they're remote, a dark, broody, modal, Minor E groove, and I’m actually very proud of the wording in that, because I think if you’re into the words between the words, there's a lot there.
VISIT: The Lowest Pair
Photo: Sarah Cass
