Premiere: Parker Ainsworth and Jessie Payo, ‘Black Smoke’

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Parker Ainsworth and Jessie Payo (Photo by Courtney Barriger)

From the sea to the desert, Parker Ainsworth and Jessie Payo together stretch a musical canvas filled with the lushest sonic landscapes. Both thoughtful and passionate in their own songwriting, Ainsworth called in Payo for backup on his lead single “Running For So Long (House A Home)” for “The Peanut Butter Falcon” soundtrack in 2019. Their two voices fit hand-in-glove and the song hit over 4 million streams. 

Fast forward through the pandemic, when time felt amorphous, the two set about shaping songs over a three-week period in a true collaboration exploring the mystery of the desert. The result of that is “Black Smoke,” a four-song country-blues, badland-gothic journey through dark alleyways, strange sights and lonely yearnings underneath a star-filled sky. The EP includes three originals (the sinewy “Black Smoke,” boot-tapping “Not One Soul” and darkly seductive “Hands Together”) plus an eerie cover of Walter Schumann’s “Lullabye” from the 1955 classic film “Night of the Hunter.”

The EP was recorded in a one-day session produced by Chris Sclarb and engineered by Devin O’Brien at Big Ego Studios, with Phillip Glen on fiddle and piano and Stephan Hodges on drums, then mixed by Sclarb and mastered by Whynot Jansveld.

||| Stream: The full “Black Smoke” EP

||| Live: Ainsworth & Payo will premiere the EP live at Club Tee Gee on Nov. 7, opening for Leeann Skoda.

||| Also: Watch the video for “Running For So Long (House A Home)” from “The Peanut Butter Falcon” soundtrack

||| Previously: Parker Ainsworth: “Only Love,” “The Way That It Was,” “American Miracle;”  Jessie Payo: “Sometime,” “I Love to be Loved,” “Your Story (feat. Jessie Payo” (Distant Cousins), Live at Chinatown Summer Nights (Pom Poms), “Gimme You” (Pom Poms),  “Betty” (Pom Poms)