"Take Give" swings like a Buddhist wedding in a Southern Baptist Church and from the first line presents an intimate proposal: “If I walked across the sea, would you walk along with me?” An offer made all the more intriguing by a swaying harmonica groove and church chorus vocals which rise into the grandest of wedding vows: “If you take, then I will give.” And just as the bride leans in for her kiss, a Tuba player strolls down the aisle.  

“Take Give” was the third most played song on XM radio station "The Village." It was played during an on-the-air wedding at WMNF in Tampa, Florida and Gene Shay of WXPN Philadelphia called it: “a song that really knocks me out. It’s one of my current favorites.”


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“All of The Good Things,” is the world’s most uplifting song about death. With soaring vocals and driving drums, we’re given a listen to what it might sound like in the changing room where the souls of the dying slip into new skin and are born back into the gorgeous forests of family and friends. 

AllofTheGoodThings SAMPLE

“Jennie Hodgers” begins with the rolling snare of a civil war battlefield that sends you suddenly marching (with a musket) beside a young Irish woman dressed as a man who fought her way through the civil war. Jennie was America’s most unsung hero, and in this song, she’s given a voice. “Oh Mama,” she sings, “I am your daughter, but a wife I will never be. I’ll be a soldier until my last breath delivers me.” Her voice strikes with the energy of a rattlesnake, yet soars with the grace of a butterfly high above a battlefield.

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Written while watching a leaf storm shower down from a giant oak tree in Oregon, “Long May You Live” is an anthem as wide as the sky. While leaves swirled outside his window, Wolff saw faces. The leaves became faces of sailors and blacksmiths, of surgeons and Vietnamese violinists. A whole parade of souls passed before his bewildered gaze. The song begins with a solitary drummer on the coast of Thailand joined suddenly by a Appalachian banjo and Wolff’s slightly southern vocal which blesses the entire vivid spectrum of life, from “the smiling Dalai Lama” to “the wolves that roam in Yellowstone.” With harmonies like a cheerleader choir and rollicking instrumentation, “Long May You Live” reminds us of the pulse which we share with all of life, from apple trees to ocean tides. 

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"Bird in The Corn" is a swirling narrative about the crushing power of nature sung with a voice as sinuous and powerful as the flood the song describes. The chorus “Swing slow sweet blade, hungry for all you take away,” is wrapped in a shimmering ribbon of dobro that soars and dives like a bat coming home at sunrise. 

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“Lauren’s Forest” was inspired by Wolff’s great-great-great-great grandmother, Clara Carr. In the song, you meet a ghost named Lauren who sends her sister Clara to marry the groom she left behind. But before her sister arrives, the widower whispers his anguished tale from the closet where he sits with a shotgun in his hands. From the center of his sorrow, a bass drum thunders and the clink of tambourine suggests a man in chains. “Breathing in, I’m breathing in,” he sings, “breathing out, I’m breathing out, feel the moonlight on my skin, feel my feet upon the ground, now.” The lyrics of the first three choruses are nearly drowned by the howls of a pack of timberwolves, but by the final chorus, the moonlight changes to sunlight and a lost man is  revived by love’s revolving light

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Inspired by a homeless man who regained his footing after years of addiction and began an organization to help kids who were aging out of the foster care system, “Wildflowers” paints a haunting portrait of children who “rise from rust” and  bloom into adulthood.

Wildflowers SAMPLE

Wolff Bowden grew up in a house on concrete stilts, fifteen feet above a Florida swamp. Summer nights brought symphonies of alligators, owls and frogs. But in Wolff’s recurring dream, it was always winter, and he walked out among the cypresses to sit by a blazing fire where he would sing to a strange collection of forest beings he called The Winterlings. 
 
Amanda Birdsall was working on a doctorate in psychology, halfway through an Adult Psychopathology class, when she looked down at her notebook. Instead of transcribing the lecture, she had completely filled the margins with song lyrics. She stood up, walked out of class, grabbed her guitar and drove to Canada where she worked on organic farms in exchange for food and tiny rooms where she wrote songs by candlelight.
 
Since childhood, Wolff had been painting his dreams of otherworldly beings, skeletons on bicycles and winged women. He painted secretly from grade school to college, shot some slides, and was named Artist of the Millennium by ARTEXPO MIAMI. At the show, Wolff sold his first painting to baseball legend Andre Dawson. After that, he traveled the country making and selling art. The art sales bought Wolff time to write. He published two books of poetry, including thirty-six poems that appeared in literary magazines. But for Wolff, something was still missing. A deep wish remained unfulfilled. He had turned paint into money into time into poetry, but like an alchemist who had turned steel to silver, he knew there was another step. How could he turn bright canvases and poetry to music? He needed a way to paint the wind itself, to extract color from silence and distill it into song. But he had never learned an instrument. He couldn’t play a single chord. 
 
Meanwhile, Amanda roamed. Camping in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, bagging dried fruit in a Canadian nut factory, and cultivating collards in North Carolina gradually led her south to Florida, where she fought for abused children as a social worker. But the job was heartrending, so she left to clean houses for a year until exhaustion and the cost of rent drove her into the air-conditioned corporate world.  Her guitar went under the bed in the coffin of its case, and like any good ghost, it haunted her. 
 
Wolff  & Amanda met one night at a party where a Buddhist ritual had just taken place in a backyard fire pit. The ritual consisted of writing, on small slips of paper, wishes that would burn in the flames so their smoke might lift them into the wind and make them real. Wolff burned his wish and Amanda arrived an hour later. She was the muse and the music he had been waiting for, and his life as an artist re-awakened her desire for a creative life.
 
Wolff and Amanda sold their cars on Ebay, bought a banged-up van from a motorcycle shop, and drove to Oregon where they knew no one. They rented a small apartment next to a large forest and wrote the songs for their first album: On The Night You Were Born. This album, released under the name of The Orphan Trains, supported a second trip west where Amanda and Wolff slipped into a creative cocoon, wrote their new album, The Animal Groom, and became The Winterlings. 
While touring to support THE ANIMAL GROOM, The Winterlings have played the CMJ Music festival in Manhattan, the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle and have played sold-out shows at PSALM SALON and Appel Farm. 

Playing shows as a duo, trio and full band, The Winterlings now live and perform regularly in Seattle, Washington. 


The Winterlings

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