Andy Baxter
Location
Home, Florence, Alabama
Associated Acts
Penny & Sparrow
I am exactly 50% of a music band called Penny & Sparrow, which is a folk/americana duo. I sing lead and put my hands in my pockets onstage, that is my job. The first thing we released musically was nine years ago. I grew up in a musical house. Mom loved musical theatre; sister was in musical theatre. There was a lot of singing at church. We went to church every time the door was open. I found out I had a knack for it. Before Glee was a thing, I was in show choir, it was really great for me, I loved it. Music has been a part of whatever I did forever. Music was always going in the house; radio was always going in the car. I learned harmony from my mom singing to 90’s country and my dad’s car was 92.5 KZPS, classic rock. I got such a varied musical palate because they are both so different in that regard. I grew up in and around Fort Worth Texas. Went to college at the University of Texas at Austin where I met my wife and my band mate, and that began Penny & Sparrow.
We have made autobiographical music since the beginning. You can look at any individual record we made and it’s a pretty easy snapshot of what we loved about music and what thought and believe and how we love individually as people around the time we made it. It’s not the only way to make music, but it’s the way we have. The desire to be prolific and the desire to be ever changing has been there since the start. If you set at the very start of making a creative endeavor one of your totems as malleability, it helps you not pin yourself down too long, you can try any number of things. The skeleton of every song is me and him and a guitar then you can dress it up a thousand ways, it can wear so many different costumes and be fine.
I value more than I used to clocking in and doing creative instead of waiting for there to be some lightning in a bottle creative moment. I read every day. I write every day. That may mean all I can muster is one useable sentence, or it can mean that I tried eight different verse options for a song and none of them were good and they are all trash, but I showed up and sat down. Show up, work on the craft.
The craft being learning words, harvesting words, so that you can use as much of the English language as possible. It’s a big language man, big! I feel like the word bank that musicians are using is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. The only way that I know how to fight against that personally is to read a bunch and try to harvest as many words as I can. I love that part of my job; it might be my favorite part of my job.
The Shoals already is and can remain a hotbed of creativity and good music being made if people are willing to stay and make music here. There’s a huge mixture of music people up and down every single street, in the whole Shoals. The thing that would grease the wheels even further is when the old guard leans into the new guard, allowing that intermingling of old and new blood. The less separation that you can have from the people on that DVD to the people making music now, under 25, the better. Intermingle as much as possible. There are so many raw ingredients to throw into the crock pot here that don’t exist in other places.
