Musical duo’s canoe odyssey stops in Winona
Paul Spring and Sam Phipps of Minneapolis are interviewed by Joseph Costello after their show at The MidWest Music Store on Friday, May 27. The duo are taking a 1,200 mile canoe trip down the Mississippi river from Lake Itasca to St. Louis. They are playing a number of concerts along the way. As high schoolers in St. Cloud they played in a band called Spontaneous Combustion. Spring is a Winona native whose family moved to St. Cloud when he was in grade school, and many of his siblings attended Cotter.
Spring played acoustic guitar and sang and Phipps added accordion. The duo played a set which included “Towards the Center”, “The Wetlands”, “Place You Leave”, an accordion led instrumental, “Dancin in the Moonlight”, “Mississippi River”, “Mind Over Matter’, “take Another Moment”, and “Cass Lake Sunset”. The songs featured sharp. literate lyrics and clear, casual delivery, which fit the performance space and audience nicely, and, as the titles suggest, there was a thematic current running through the show.
