Goodnight Moonshine

Goodnight Moonshine is a guitar and vocal duet, and a musical marriage in all senses. The duo combines the evocative voice and songwriting of Molly Venter, known for her sublime singing in the prominent female-vocal-group Red Molly, with Eben Pariser – who cut his teeth as a street performer in New York City, playing guttural music of New Orleans with his band Roosevelt Dime. The result is folk music with a depth of improvisation and tonal subtlety usually reserved for jazz. NPR’s Jedd Beaudoin comments: “Pariser’s harmonic sensibilities are wide, imaginative, while Venter’s singular voice recalls pre-diva singers who could lay out emotions without melodrama.”

Venter’s voice, which can be called both “biker-chick smoky” (New Haven Register), and “like silk” (American Songwriter Magazine), has taken her career to highlights including Tønder Festival in Denmark, Kate Wolf Fest in CA, and multiple placements on television and film. In Goodnight Moonshine she is in full force as a songwriter. Her trance-induced stream-of-consciousness writing style results in compositions that probe the depths of her inner experience.

Starting as a blues guitarist in his teens, Pariser’s imagination was quickly captured by classic jazz, which he studied at the Oberlin Conservatory. “Pariser’s harmonic sensibilities are wide, imaginative” (NPR), and his career has involved singing lead and playing bass with Roosevelt Dime, playing drums and being musical director of Red Molly – but his love of jazz and improvising is what’s on display in Goodnight Moonshine.

Guitar and vocal duos are rare and few come to mind, but the ones that do, such as Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, and The Milk Carton Kids, have achieved and integration between singular talents in a format that is both genreless and grounded in the commonness of two guitars, two voices. Goodnight Moonshine is taking their own stab at this unusual and deeply personal approach. Their show is punctuated by songs and banter that openly explore the complexities of their relationship to each other, the Creator, birth, life, death, and what happens when, “the honeymoon ends?” For Venter and Pariser, It is the way they make space for each other while staying true to themselves that defines this music, and marriage.

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