The Lone Bellow Share a Pair of New Songs, Announce North American Tour

Brooklyn-based folk band The Lone Bellow have shared a pair of new songs along with the dates for their North American tour. The band shared videos for their cover of The National’s “Pink Rabbits,” as well as their own track “The Restless” off their forthcoming The Restless EP, out Oct. 19 through Descendant Records.

The tracks find the three members, Zach Williams, Kanene Pipkin and Brian Elmquist, building three-part harmonies and trading vocal leads over sparse acoustics and mandolin swells. “Pink Rabbits” finds them reimagining Matt Berninger’s baritone ode to suburban alcoholism into a Greek chorus by way of Appalachia, a campfire ode to heartbreak and ennui that works remarkably well even when stripped of Berninger’s signature vocals. “The Restless” is a classic bluegrass ditty, all curlicue vocal cadences and simple strum patterns. Both videos are recorded live, capturing the acoustic atmosphere of their genesis nicely. “Pink Rabbits” sounds close and warm in its wood-paneled room, while “The Restless” captures the distant buzz of summer cicadas and rustling wind.

The band will be bringing that live experience on the road with a stripped-down acoustic set featuring the three members gathered around one microphone. “Since we released our first album in 2013, we’ve been setting a few songs aside every night to sing together around one mic, and those times have become some of our most memorable musical moments of touring together,” singer Zach Williams said. “The responses to those acoustic sets have been so powerful, that we decided to put together an entire tour all around that one microphone.”

Check out “Pink Rabbits” and “The Restless” below, as well as a similar “trio-mic” performance of “Watch Over Us” from 2013.