The Lowest Pair Interview: Play Fast, Play With Your Heart

The Lowest Pair is a duo featuring Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee. Their harmonies, beautiful banjo and guitar playing, and sometimes haunting lyrics hooked me from the first time I heard their music. They have a few shows coming up in the area—make it a point to get out and hear them live. We got a chance to chat with Kendl for a few minutes before they head east.

RLR: I know you grew up in Arkansas but also have roots in Washington. How did you come to this music—did you grow up playing banjo or was this something that you found later in life?

KW: I came to it later. My mom was an orchestra teacher at the middle school and high school. And my father was a low brass professor at a college. So there was always music around and my parents took me to hear symphonies. But I was mostly interested in punk music in Arkansas.

Then I moved to Washington and I got really keen on the sound of the banjo. And I met people who were playing guitar and fiddle, so I started playing banjo to fill out the sound. I thought, now that I have this banjo, what kind of music is played on it? I kind of used the banjo as a back door into the scene.

RLR: Mentioning punk music makes me think of this thing I read that said the crossroads of punk and roots music is Charlie Parr.

KW: Yeah, I love Charlie Parr. He’s so humble, and a great musician. I think there’s a lot of crossover between punk and roots music. It’s authentic, you play fast, and play with your heart.

RLR: Thinking about authenticity, in “How Can I Roll,” you take some of the lyrics from “Nine Pound Hammer” and give them a new spin within this imagery of going to the mountain. Both in that song, but in general, how do you think about creating music that has this long history and that new music is often assessed by its “authenticity” or adherence to that tradition?

KW: There are definitely some traditionalists. I appreciate that, and it’s a whole different art from to be able to recreate that sound. And I’ve had CDs sent back from traditional bluegrass festivals, like, nope, that’s not what we do.

But music’s never been that static. It’s been passed down and brought to where people are. Having lines, like from “Nine Pound Hammer,” that remind you of your roots…it’s a trust factor; as listeners, we want this familiarity in order to trust the writer that they’re present with us.

[Laughs] And when I’m repurposing lyrics, I’m like, this is already written, great!

RLR: How does your writing process work as a duo? Do you tend to work on things together, or is each song more of a solo project at first?

KW: Most of the time, it’s on our own. We’ve been so much together that we’re hungry for our own voice. We’re both songwriters individually, that’s how we came to the project. When we have space, time, we can work together. And when we first started, in those sessions we worked really hard to work together.

It’s a challenge, and we put ourselves through the wringer anyway as writers, so it can be hard to know how tightly to funnel a song into our own thing.

In a couple of months, this winter, we’ll have some time off and be able to come back to the project with renewed energy and songs. You kind of need the time off the road, the real life, and the space to practice and create sounds for yourself for a bit. I always think of performing as the flowering part of the process of growth. But you gotta die and compost and grow a little too in order to keep the full cycle going.

RLR: The last time you went into the studio, you came out with two new albums. Can you talk about that process and what made you and Palmer decide that one album wasn’t going to cut it this time?

KW: We started working with Dave Simonett and Eric Koskinen about a year ago and by the time we got back to finish, we had a lot more songs. We were going to record them all and then figure out which ones to put on the album, but then it wasn’t clear which ones to eliminate. And we wanted a large group of tunes to pull out in our set.

We like to be present with the songs we’re singing. Often times a song’s meaning changes and it’s mood changes over time, but there’s a specialness about a song at its infancy when it’s still close to it’s story or muse that inspired it. I think in the past we’ve been very energetically charged by the emotional elements of our music.

I really like writing and recording, though. If it were up to me, I’d write and record an album every six months or so and then just go hiking in the woods.

You can see The Lowest Pair perform at The Riverwalk Café in Nashua, NH on October 14 and at Club Passim on October 16. They’ll make their way back west after stops in Washington, DC, Pennsylvania, and NYC. Full tour dates are here.  

Photo Credit: Joseph Daniel Robert O’Leary