Interview with Penny and Sparrow
We had the pleasure of interviewing Penny and Sparrow over Zoom video!\xa0
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\u201cOlly olly oxen free!\u201d If you ever played hide-and-go-seek or capture the flag growing up, odds are good that you\u2019ve shouted these words into the hot summer night, beckoning your unseen comrades out of their hiding places in exchange for safe passage home. But what does it actually mean? The origins of the phrase are murky, with variations existing in multiple languages over the centuries. Some trace it back to the German \u201calle, alle, auch sind frei,\u201d which roughly translates to \u201call, all, also are free.\u201d Others attribute it to a mix of French and Dutch, which would yield the similar \u201cgo, go, come in free.\u201d For Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke\u2014the musical duo better known as Penny and Sparrow\u2014the phrase spoke to something far deeper than a children\u2019s game, though, something profoundly existential.
Written and recorded over the past year, Olly Olly is a work of liberation and revelation, a full-throated embrace of the self from a band that\u2019s committed to leaving no stone unturned in their tireless quest for actualization. The songs here are fearless and introspective, embracing growth and change as they reckon with desire, intimacy, doubt, and regret, and the arrangements are similarly bold and thoughtful, augmenting the duo\u2019s rich, hypnotic brand of chamber folk with electronic flourishes and R&B grooves. Baxter and Jahnke produced Olly Olly themselves, working on their own without an outside collaborator for the first time, and the result is the purest, most authentic act of artistic self-expression the pair have ever achieved.\xa0\xa0\xa0
Stuck at home with nothing but time on his hands, Jahnke leaned into bedroom pop, R&B, and hip-hop for sonic inspiration, pushing his boundaries in an attempt to forge new sounds that went against expectations. There was a certain amount of contrarianism at play (tell him you can\u2019t write a folk song over a trap beat and he\u2019d write you a folk song over a trap beat), but more than that, Jahnke was engaged in a conscious attempt to rewrite his own neural pathways, to step out of the invisible boxes that had bound him for much of his life. Baxter took a similar approach within his lyrics, which he worked on at home in Florence, AL, responding to Jahnke\u2019s melodic cues by writing with new tones and modes of voice.\xa0
In the end, that\u2019s what Olly Olly is all about: finding new ways to use language and melody as acts of emancipation and self-discovery.
We want to hear from you! Please email Tera@BringinitBackwards.com.
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