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Kendl Winter Shares "Rise and Fall" from upcoming album 'Stumbler's Business'

Jun 15, 2018 03:00PM ● By Editor

From broadwayworld.com - June 15, 2018

Hear Kendl Winter's newest track, "Rise and Fall" is sparse, mirroring the landscape of where it was written in rural Minnesota where Winter says she "had a room to myself up in Lutsen, MN north of Duluth on Lake Superior and I kinda holed up and wrote this song. It pretty much was written as it came out. "All of it is chemical, all of it is magical""

Winter's solo album, her first in five years and first for Team Love Records is a stark folk affair, a natural extension of the work her and Palmer T. Lee have created over the past half decade as The Lowest Pair. Paste introduced the first taste of Winter's new album, her first on Team Love after her work with Olympia's K Records, with "Solitude", calling it "a humble slice of rolling thunder" and saying Winter brings "a ragged punky energy to traditional roots music" and that "the sounds of her Southern upbringing supplies the foundation for her rough-and-tumble solo efforts."

"[Solitude is an] organic and epic ode to self" - Week in Pop

"Solitude, inhabits a space between Nick Drake and Iris DeMent, with a casual falsetto lift and a pessimist's lyrical abandon." - Chillfltr

"detailed and fluid and its heart open, "Solitude" is compassionate, sharply-observed and impeccable" - Autumn Roses

"I ran with Solitude for about a year," Winter explains "it started on a foggy one lane highway in the Smokies in West Virginia, I took it on the rail trail in the Hudson Valley and stumbled on some more of it riverside in Waterloo, Iowa. I fumbled over the lyrics running in circles in Durham and sang them drunk at my bandmate in a motel where he gave me the line "I'll be sober, four leaf clover, and I answered "I swear I'll never drink again." I took Solitude back to Olympia and rearranged and chopped off some of the edges and added some percussive elements. I sang with myself and got some friends to sing with me in Joey Seward's garage in Shelton, WA. I spent a lot of time with Solitude before it was ready. It was great to do it together. It's right in line with all the rest of this Stumbler's Business."

Winter grew up in Arkansas, but fell in love with Olympia, Washington even before she moved there after high school. When she is not on the road touring her music or hitting some trail, she is buoyed in the Puget Sound aboard her houseboat, the Dandelion. Her musical adventures have wandered from finger picking to electric guitars to old-time roots and bluegrass banjo, and back again; with her earliest pursuits in punk and string bands, and solo work released on Olympia's own label K. She is currently one half of the banjo/ guitar duo known as The Lowest Pair (Team Love), with Palmer T. Lee. Comparisons have been made to Karen Dalton, Gillian Welch, and Iris DeMent, but Kendl's voice is all her own.

Most of the songs on Stumbler's Business were written in the rare still spaces between places on tour, and they pulse with a tidal push-pull. Exploring tensions, seeking understanding, finding love, getting lost. Her banjo speaks its own language -it sings what hasn't been said. The album was recorded in Joey Seward's studio just outside of Olympia with the help of some friends. In Kendl's words, it's about "the business of falling and catching yourself, or not, scraping your knees, climbing out of the piles, trying again, knowing that stumbling is a part of growing, forgetting, learning again, and again.

The Lowest Pair / Kendl Winter tour
06/16 - Logan, OH - Duck Creek Log Jam
06/29 - Winona, MN - Concert on the Green - Great River Shakespeare Festival
06/30 - La Crosse, WI - the Root Note
07/05 - Bayfield, WI - Big Top Chautauqua
07/19 - North Plains, OR - Northwest String Summit 


You can listen to Kendl Winter's "Rise and Fall" here. The song was written in Lutsen

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