For most of the 2010s, Molly Venter and Eben Pariser, the New Haven-based married duo who compose the Americana folk band Goodnight Moonshine, were modern-day troubadours.
Venter took her powerhouse vocals, jaw-dropping range and biker-chick smokiness coast-to-coast and across continents with the acclaimed Americana folk all-women trio Red Molly. With his hard-touring group Roosevelt Dime, Pariser, a virtuosic musician, guitarist, and producer, packed and unpacked a jug band irreverence and Dixieland exuberance from New York City’s Union Square to the California coast. Together, as Goodnight Moonshine, they did festivals and shows.
Then came the early weeks of the pandemic lockdown. The two found themselves with three young kids, including twin babies, and neither playdates nor gigs on the horizon nor anyone, a friend, a relative, swooping in for an afternoon of relief.
“We were completely underwater, underprepared, unraveling,” said Venter, ahead of the hometown debut of the duo’s third album this Saturday night at the Space Ballroom in Hamden.
The tracks of that new album, Business Unusual, grew out of that time, from the sheer monotony of their days, to post-partum exhaustion, to the cognitive dissonance, as Venter put it, of knowing “how blessed, how lucky we were,” and still finding herself irritated at the insistent cries of her infants.
Venter grew up in New Haven with two musical parents, learning to play guitar while on a sailboat and getting hooked on Tracy Chapman, REM, and Cyndi Lauper. After college, she moved around, landing in Austin, Texas. A year after joining Red Molly, she met Pariser, a Maine native, at a folk conference. He was with the street band Roosevelt Dime. Eventually they married and had a son.
As Goodnight Moonshine, the two enjoyed success at festivals and gigs and with twostudio albums, but “the other bands had always been the focus,” said Pariser, who was musical director of Red Molly. Once the pandemic hit, “no one was touring, no one could play out, and we were suddenly struck by this enormous gratitude of having our favorite person in the world to play with under our own roof.”
From that revelation came possibility. Which is where “Welcome Home,” the final track of the new record comes in, one that, as Pariser put it, “puts you in that feel-good, get-up-and shake-your-tail-feathers, buy-the-next-round kind of vibe.”
The track title comes from the words of a “long, sinewy man with a long white beard and no shirt at the Kerrville Folk Festival [in Austin, Texas],” Venter said. “From the minute you set foot on the ranch, he would say ‘Welcome home!’ and throw his arms around you, and the whole festival that’s how people greet each other.”
In the midst of composing the song, “we found ourselves asking each other, what if having a family, three kids, living that whole life, wasn’t about giving up on your dreams, your soul, your identity, your mission?” Pariser asked. “What if that magic, that sense of welcome home, pull up a chair, singing around a campfire, doesn’t necessarily end? What if the music business for us could be not business as usual but business unusual?”
Whatever the answer is, one thing is for sure. For Venter and Pariser, the mission for Saturday night, and every performance, is simple. “It’s about bringing people together to sing, to clap, to stomp, to feel feelings, and to feel all that together,” Pariser said.
The show at the Space Ballroom, which begins at 7:30, will open with Josiah Venter, Molly’s brother. Jazz musician Adam Chilenski, Pariser’s oldest collaborator (from the second grade), will play bass with the duo. “When Adam is playing, everyone feels like they’re floating in a cloud of gold,” Venter said.
She paused. “You’re never going to escape the mundane, we sure as hell won’t, but there is beauty in the mundane,” she said. “So really we’re about taking a moment to recognize how fleeting and beautiful this all is and to honor that.”
