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, with Eben Pariser’s adventurous guitar playing. The result is folk music with a depth of improvisation and tonal subtlety usually reserved for jazz.
Molly is well known for her sublime singing in the prominent female-vocal-group Red Molly, while Eben cut his teeth as a street performer in New York City, playing guttural music of New Orleans with his band Roosevelt Dime.
Molly’s enviable 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. Her hit song “Hold It All”, recorded with Red Molly and performed regularly with Goodnight Moonshine, questions the meaning of life, and grapples with acceptance, with honesty and heart usually reserved for literary writers- which she also is- she writes a weekly column on Patreon.com
Starting as a blues guitarist in his teens, Eben’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 it is his love of jazz and improvising on display in Goodnight Moonshine. A natural producer, Eben has 8 studio records under his belt for himself and other artists, and recently launched the new record label, Equitone Records.
After cutting several records, and experimenting with limitless creative possibilities of studio production, Goodnight Moonshine is now thrilling audiences as an acoustic guitar duo. The format allows them to focus entirely on each other's gifts, and enter a hypnotic trance, a cycle of responsive vocal inspiration and guitar improvisation that deepens throughout the show. It is a main-line of the very best that both artists have to offer, and perhaps why their single-mike show has become an unlikely festival act- in 2023 they are slated to play Arts And Ideas (CT), Red Ants Pants (MT), and Sisters Folk Fest (OR).
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 genre-less 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 Molly and Eben, It is the way they make space for each other while staying true to themselves that defines this music, and marriage.
