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

Field Guide makes music at his home in Winnipeg,Manitoba,Canada. Usually he writes songs in his kitchen, sometimes in the studio upstairs with the help of a drum machine, and occasionally they are beamed down to a hotel room somewhere in America when there is a day off to be had on the road.Kris Ulrich is a frequent collaborator, the two have recorded a lot of music together at Kris’s home studio in Saint Boniface, as well as at Ditch Lake, which is just outside of Riding Mountain National Park. fg moved to Toronto for a while in 2019/2020, and there hemet Georgia Harmer and Julian Psihogios, with whom he and Kris formed the band Dweller; they put out an EP of music in fall of 2023. In the spring of 2020,f g released his sophomore breakout EP ‘You Were’ followed by several collections of music throughout the pandemic. With touring finally being back on the table, fg was fortunate to support some heroes and new friends including Leif Vollebekk, Bahamas, SYML, Penny & Sparrow, andWild Rivers on tour in Canada, the US, and Europe. In the spring of 2023, Field Guide embarked on his first North American headline tour, which included 36 shows in Canada and the US.

Over the past year, fg has been busy working on his upcoming album ‘Rootin for Ya’. This album feels a little different than past efforts. Several of the songs were recorded entirely by fg at home with no collaborators, and though every Field Guide record has been recorded at least partly in solitude, this was new territory. These songs were built from the ground up with drum machines, janky 80s Yamaha synthesizers, and bourbon-steeped vocals; their creation was a practice in trusting your gut, immersing yourself deeply in your own taste, and an understanding that limitations can often result in something special.

After fully recording and mixing an album’s worth of material in this largely solitary way, fg began to feel as though some of the songs were yearning for the fiery energy of fast paced collaboration and live-off-the-floor tracking. This led to revisiting a handful of the songs with friends and frequent collaborators Kris Ulrich and Julian Psihogios. The three tracked 4 songs completely live off the floor in a little cabin in Manitoba. This revisited material gave life to a beautiful juxtaposing album of songs. Some of them masterminded in solitude, and others born of the magic that can only exist when musical minds work together in pursuit of a shared goal.