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“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.

“The idea of calling out to everyone in hiding to reveal themselves and be free just resonated with us on a fundamental level,” says Baxter. “In a sense, that’s what we’re doing with this album.”

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.

“Andy and I talk about the process of making this record like a sort of musical Rumspringa,” Jahnke says. “It was an opportunity to truly become ourselves, to evolve outside of the roles we’d been put in—or put ourselves in—because of the way we’d grown up.”    

Texas natives Baxter and Jahnke first crossed paths at UT Austin, where they developed a fast friendship and a deeply symbiotic musical connection. Jahnke was a gifted guitarist with an ear for melody, Baxter, an erudite lyricist with a mesmerizing voice and crystalline falsetto, and the duo quickly found that their vocals blended together as if they’d been singing in harmony their whole lives. Beginning with 2013’s ‘Tenboom,’ the staunchly DIY pair released a series of critically lauded records that garnered comparisons to the hushed intimacy of Iron & Wine and the adventurous beauty of Bon Iver, building up a devoted fanbase along the way through relentless touring and word-of-mouth buzz. NPR praised the band’s songwriting as a “delicate dance between heartache and resolve,” while Rolling Stone hailed their catalog as “folk music for Sunday mornings, quiet evenings, and all the fragile moments in between.” In addition to all the glowing reviews, the band also earned high profile fans (including The Civil Wars’ John Paul White, who produced 2015’s Let A Lover Drown You), tour dates with everyone from Josh Ritter to Drew Holcomb, and a slew of their own sold out headline shows across the country.

The duo’s most recent album, 2019’s Finch, marked a turning point in their career, pushing their sound to experimental new heights as it wrestled with notions of masculinity and religion and transformation in deeper, more personal ways than ever before. The record debuted at #2 on the Billboard Heatseekers Chart and was met with a rapturous response from critics and audiences alike, racking up more than 40 million streams on Spotify and earning the band their biggest headline tour to date. Before the pair could finish touring the album, though, the COVID-19 pandemic swept in, forcing them off the road and grinding the entire live music industry to a standstill. 

“All of the sudden, we got handed this gigantic, blank calendar,” says Baxter. “From the very beginning, Kyle and I have tried to stay true to a core set of values with this band, and one of them was to be prolific, so we just immediately set our sights on writing and recording as much as we could.”

Aside from the obvious tumult and uncertainty that came with lockdowns and quarantine, Jahnke found himself going through a period of unexpected personal turmoil at the time, as well.

“I had moved to Waco with my wife right around the time Finch came out,” he explains. “She was in law school, which kept her quite busy, and when COVID cancelled everything, I couldn’t really go out and explore this new town I was living in, so I just ended up being alone a lot. I’d never really experienced that kind of intense loneliness, and working on music felt like the only thing keeping me from going crazy.”

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 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 with in 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. 

“I’d started therapy a few months before the pandemic began,” says Baxter, “and while some of that inevitably came out in the music, I was intentionally trying to reach beyond myself, as well, diving more into fiction and storytelling than ever before.”

Album opener “Adeline” sets the stage with a spare guitar and vocal arrangement that finds Baxter and Jahnke singing about a love so pure that nothing—not the past, not the future, not even the afterlife—can distract from it. Like much of Olly Olly, it’s a dreamy, impressionistic piece, one rooted in the power of emotional extremes. The churning “Alabama Haint” imagines an ex-lover as a malevolent spirit to be warded off; the soulful “Need You” wades into an unhealthy relationship that borders on addiction; and the airy “Lacuna” wrestles with the kind of memory that just won’t fade.

Perhaps the most complicated relationships the album deals with, though, are the ones Baxter and Jahnke have with themselves and their past. The intoxicating “GoGoGo,” which foregoes acoustic instruments altogether in favor of a swirling alt-pop arrangement, revels in the ecstasy of truly knowing yourself, while the mesmerizing “Voodoo” reimagines the beatitudes as an ode to sexual empowerment. “What if roommates hear us? / Blessed be the fearless / Let ’em bear witness,” Baxter sings. “Blessed be ‘How does it feel?’ / Playing it now is surreal / Blessed be the new and the old me / And blessed be the beauty in loving both.”

“‘Voodoo’ is about reclaiming eroticism and arousal,” says Baxter, “but doing it in language that feels like scripture. Writing it that way felt like using some of the institution that wounded us to heal and get back what we lost.”

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.

“If Finch was the sound of us evolving and changing, then this album is us the sound of us being more self-aware, more fully ourselves than we’ve ever been,” Baxter continues. “It’s us being the most unadulterated versions of who we are.”

Olly olly oxen free, indeed.