I was doing grad school papers and just wanted to learn an instrument out of boredom. At the time I was still in science, studying biology and working in a lab. When I wrote the first song I ever wrote, I was still learning guitar. Kyle: Prior to that, we were doing it for zero years. How long had you been doing music individually prior to that? It all just kinda started with us playing covers for our buddies because we thought they sounded good.

We started randomly playing and singing together randomly as a hobby, and there was another buddy of ours who gave us the band name because we stole it from his blog. How’d you get started working together musically?Īndy: We lived in a room together in a big house in college with a bunch of other guys.

How long have you been writing songs together? Sometimes, even when he just sends me a voice memo of random syllables, he’ll accidentally say a word in the middle and I’ll just leave it in or build the song around it because usually it sings pretty.

Then I’ll ask, “What was this like to you when you were writing it? Was it a hurtful song? A happy song?” From there, I just kinda take it and run with it and fill in the blanks mad-lib style to create whatever the sentence was I think he was trying to say. He hums it into the Voice Memos app on his iPhone, even if it’s all over syllabically, and he’ll send that to me and I’ll play it on loop for a while, either on guitar or through headphones. We chat with the Texan pair about getting started, working with John Paul White and how voice memos play into their songwriting.Īndy: Usually Kyle does a large percentage of the melody and a bird’s eye view of the instrumentation and I do most of the words. Formed as the accidental result of a grad school hobby, the best friend duo write beautiful, gentle, slow-burning songs that masterfully straddle the line between happy and sad. Of all the new Americana acts on the scene – particularly the ones we caught at SXSW this year – duo Penny & Sparrow are perhaps the most refreshing.

Penny and sparrow