Windier, Lisa/Liza, and Reid Parsons

Windier plays foggy electric folk music made up of cello, drums, guitar, bass, and three voices. Drawing inspiration from indie rock acts like Smog, The Microphones, Yo La Tengo, and Dear Nora, the band plays lyric-forward music about home, dreams, the life of mountains and towers, birth, loss, and strange birds overhead. The band recently set off on a cross country tour with their newest album, "Doesn't the Baby." Windier includes songwriter Asa Shadis, bassist Simi Kunin, and cellist Annie Dodson, all of whom call Maine home.

Lisa/Liza’s catalog spans ten years, with four albums on Orindal Records, a single released through Mexican Summer’s Looking Glass, and a spate of self-released home recordings. Her songwriting invites traditional folk guitar-playing and lyricism into dream-like domains, directing memory’s imperfections toward restoration and healing.

On her latest album, Breaking and Mending, the heavy, open-ended waltzes of her past work assume a more linear form, as Lisa/Liza carries on her tradition of shedding light on personal trauma and life’s greater mysteries through song. Questions about love and the natural world are met with moments of clarity, sparked by recollections of Judee Sill or John Prine. Above all, Breaking and Mending deals in dualities and the beauty of self-reconstruction, as carefully underlined in the opening track, “Felt Twice”:

They tell me “the body minds,”

they said that, the mind was the body,

Well each time that I fell,

I felt twice, What else can I tell everybody?

Reid Parsons is an open book on stage, words stripped to the heartwood. Parsons's lyrics are honest and simple, placed with intention in a true craftsman style. Not one to beat around the bush, Parsons has a knack of distilling the hurts and hopes of life into compact tunes that live in the liminal spaces between genres. “Parsons has a warm spirit. Even though her tunes touch on hardships and dark times, they impart a sense of hope that’s lately in short supply” (Jordan Adams, Seven Days).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Oxbow Blending & Bottling, 49 Washington Avenue, Portland, United States