“Harder Than It Should Be,” the latest single from Goodnight Moonshine — the New Haven-based duo of Molly Venter and Eben Pariser — starts with a cooing, provocative line from Venter while Pariser joins on guitar. It’s a simple setup that lets the song unfold in its own time, as Pariser gradually adds in other elements while Venter’s voice, front and center, unfurls lyrics range across the history of a relationship and politics, striking just the right balance of personal and universal.
Whitney Kidder Photo
Pariser and Venter.
The song suggests something of what audiences might expect as the duo opens for Pokey LaFarge on Aug. 26 in Edgewood Park along Edgewood Avenue, as part of CT Folk’s “Folk at the Edge” concert series
It also exemplifies the turns Venter and Pariser, who are married, made when they became parents to twins while the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered the live music scene, as they took themselves off the road, switched to regular livestreaming, and plotted a course for themselves through a post-pandemic music industry that was already in flux before the pandemic, and only somewhat resembles what it was in 2019.
Venter’s connection to CT Folk “goes back far,” she said. “My parents’ house was the green room for 15 years for CT Folk when it was in Edgerton Park,” and she and her family went every year while she was growing up. She later played the festival as part of the New York-based trio Red Molly and Goodnight Moonshine played its regular concert series.
Before the pandemic, Red Molly was Venter’s and Pariser’s bread and butter, as Venter shared frontwoman duties with Abbie Gardner and Laurie McAllister while Pariser supported them on electric guitar and percussion along with bassist Craig Akin. With Red Molly and Goodnight Moonshine, they made a living and maintained a touring life even with one child, who is now school-aged.
At the beginning of 2020, when the couple knew they were going to have twins, they knew they would have to make some changes — but they weren’t sure what.
“We were so in the grind of what we had to do,” Venter said. The pandemic’s shutdown, in some ways, turned out to be a “gift,” she said, giving them a chance to reassess how they had been going about being full-time musicians. It started with a project they’d been working on for years.
“I just had this itch to finish our home studio,” Pariser said. They had done vocal tracking at home for Goodnight Moonshine’s last album, 2018’s I’m the Only One Who Will Tell You, You’re Bad, and had the idea that future projects could be recorded there with a stream of musicians coming to the house.
“But then it turned out nobody was coming,” Pariser said. “We got it done weeks before Covid.” Then, as the pandemic shutdown settled in, “lo and behold, we were in there every single day, making videos and music.”
With Red Molly’s tour dates gone, Venter and Pariser started doing livestreams fast and drew an audience. Venter had already started a Patreon page when she learned she was having twins, through which fans could subscribe to receive weekly songs from Venter, freshly written and performed solo with a guitar. She drew over 100 subscribers and to date has made over 100 videos. Pariser started a series of online music classes and lessons through the Florida-based Truefire and did production work for other artists. They got better and better at making media.
So in July, when CT Folk asked Goodnight Moonshine to play a streaming concert in July 2020 — just before the couple’s twins were born — Venter and Pariser were ready, both technologically and musically.
“The real thing that changed for me personally,” Pariser said, was that “I had never had all the time in the world to just sit and listen to what my own guitar sounded like. The sound of my guitar was the only thing — I wasn’t running from gig to gig, listening to 10 million other people and spending all this time on the road…. One of the outcomes was that I got into playing more acoustic guitar,” and “I started to see what’s possible to create acoustically with just two guitars in the room — the details of it, the drama.”
They honed their sound to make the duo a complete unit, “its own little thing that we bring our best to,” Venter said. After a carpal tunnel injury in 2001 or 2002, Pariser finally built his strength back up to be able to play the way he wanted (“the trick is to play it delicately,” he said, “to let the guitar have its say, too”). They kept recording and making videos. In June, as they booked a few small concerts, they realized they wanted to approach performing in a different way.
Before the pandemic, they had thought quite strategically about their stage presence. “I used to be real into worrying about all the details,” Venter said. This year, she said, she understood that her “job on stage” was “just to be present…. That was a huge gift from having not done it for a while, and then to step into it again.” Their first concerts went well, and Venter and Pariser got more and more relaxed with playing new material in a new way. So when CT Folk called, asking if they would open for Pokey LaFarge, they answered.
Venter and Pariser are emerging from the pandemic on a different path from the one they were on when it started.
On one hand, it’s an uncertain one. “It’s a huge struggle right now. We’re in the midst of having twins and having our whole field fall apart,” Pariser said.
But in another sense, the uncertainty carries possibility with it. “I’ve been through three eras of the music business already,” Pariser said — the tail end of the CD era, the download era, and now the streaming era. “When I came up it was simple: the only way this works is if you’re on the road 200 days a year. Now people know that isn’t what it used to be…. I think we’re able to see the best and support the best in each other in a way that we couldn’t before.”
“We’ve diversified and we’re figuring out other income streams,” Venter said, letting them play the shows they want to play, about once a month. And that taps into the way both feel about music, about balancing the need to make money with the hope that they can continue making music that fulfills them, and audiences.
“It’s a practice with no endpoint. You pick up more as you go, and the joy is in the reaching,” Pariser said. This year finds the music industry in as much flux as ever. But maybe there are reasons for excitement as much as nervousness. In the dissolution of the old rules, and nothing to quite replace them yet, “you could actually have ingenuity again,” Pariser said. “You could be a musician who charts your own course again, and have your own unique identity and your own unique calling and path and community.”
Goodnight Moonshine plays CT Folk’s “Folk on the Edge” concert series opening for Pokey LaFarge on Aug. 26. Visit CT Folk’s website for tickets and details.