We had the pleasure of interviewing Penny and Sparrow over Zoom video!
“Olly olly oxen free!” If you ever played hide-and-go-seek or capture the flag growing up, odds are good that you’ve 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 “alle, alle, auch sind frei,” which roughly translates to “all, all, also are free.” Others attribute it to a mix of French and Dutch, which would yield the similar “go, go, come in free.” For Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke—the musical duo better known as Penny and Sparrow—the phrase spoke to something far deeper than a children’s 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’s 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’s 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.
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’t write a folk song over a trap beat and he’d 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’s melodic cues by writing with new tones and modes of voice.
In the end, that’s what Olly Olly is all about: finding new ways to use language and melody as acts of emancipation and self-discovery.
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