The Finches

The Finches function as an acoustic duo whose unadorned, emotionally direct songs channel the genuine warmth associated with folk-influenced singer/songwriter recordings of the 1960s and 1970s. Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs supplies lead vocals and guitar while Aaron Morgan contributes guitar and backing vocals. The pair first encountered each other as undergraduates at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Coming from a musical household, Riggs had already produced an EP of goth-inflected synthesizer pieces during high school; Morgan, meanwhile, belonged to Roots of Orchis, an experimental unit that blended electronics with paired bass lines. After developing a friendship, Riggs gave Morgan a cassette of her newly composed guitar songs shortly before his graduation. He listened to the demos on tour with Roots of Orchis and, upon returning, proposed forming a band to present her material. An attempt to recruit a drummer proved unsuccessful, so the Finches began performing as a two-piece acoustic act. In mid-2005 they issued their debut release, the EP Six Songs. Available solely at concerts and a few area record stores, the EP moved more than 1,200 copies before the group delivered its first full-length album, Human Like a House, on the independent Dulc-I-Tone Records label in early 2007. The sessions took on a family character: Aaron’s father, David Morgan, engineered the recordings at his home studio and added pedal steel guitar to several tracks, while Riggs’s mother contributed recorder. Riggs herself designed the album’s packaging, which was printed via letterpress and incorporated her original linoleum cuts together with a booklet of her short fiction.