Folk Alley Sessions: Dead Horses
(Session originally published April 2019)
If you had to choose just one word to describe the duo Dead Horses, it might well be “personal”; nothing is off-limits when it comes to what inspires their sound and, maybe even more importantly, the stories they tell in their music. Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the duo, Sarah Vos and Daniel Wolff, first started making music together in 2010; they cut their musical teeth playing at every opportunity that presented itself: farmers’ markets, the sides of busy roads, bars – so many bars – and any other place that would have them. And through it all, they remain dedicated to what Sarah describes as “the most worthy of pursuits for musicians” – songwriting.
From breakups to childhood memories, romantic entanglements and friends in trouble, Dead Horses tackle anything and everything that comes their way. Recently, they let us in to see how they think about music and musicianship when they stopped by Saranac Lake, NY for a Folk Alley Session at Beehive Productions’ studio.
Here they share a song inspired by the poetry of Robert Frost (from their 2018 release, My Mother the Moon,) plus a couple of new songs for 2019, including the previously unreleased, “Mighty Storm.”
Of “Mighty Storm,” Vos says, “This song was inspired by a situation from a couple summers ago. My girlfriend and I live in Wisconsin and her brother was living in California at the time, where he got into a pretty serious motorcycle accident. She had to go out there to be with him, and I couldn’t join her. I struggled a lot because I wanted to be there for her, and I wanted her to be there for me too. It was kind of a strange moment in time, so I wrote this song to try to be there for her. I sent her a cell phone recording of it, then Dan and I collaborated and arranged the parts together.”
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