I can’t quite explain the love I carry in my heart for Seattle’s the Dutchess & the Duke. The duo captured my ear toward the end of 2008. And reported today that they’ve now broken up.
I’d seen the band play the Bluebird in 2008, but it wasn’t until later that year — in December, in fact — when my pal and colleague Joe Murphy put the band’s debut, “She’s the Dutchess, I’m the Duke,” on his home stereo. As we sipped whiskey and listened to Jesse Lortz’s heartbreakingly great music, I fell in love with his words and the natural, if occasionally awkward, collision of Lortz’s plain voice and Kimberly Morrison’s sterling back-ups.
The folk-rock band’s music touched me. And that record became my No. 1 record of the year — a list I was compiling at the time of my first listen. I’ve followed them intensely ever since, seeing them at South by Southwest, Coachella (at an Ace Hotel pool party), Sasquatch and in Denver at least five times. They’re absolutely one of my favorites, and their follow-up, “Sunset / Sunrise” — No. 6 on my 2009 year-end best-of list — is still in regular rotation on my iPod.
If you don’t know them, they’re worth a listen. You can download two free singles — “Living This Life” and “Hands” — . You can also read my 2009 interview with Lortz and see a photo essay of their last Denver play, a weird and quiet little show at the Walnut Room on a very snowy night, .
The band is playing a farewell show at the Tractor in Seattle on Nov. 26. The only good news to come out of this: Lortz has another group he’s writing for, Case Studies. We couldn’t find the group’s MySpace page, but he told this about Case Studies: “Just had some songs I wanted to do, we had just put out a D/D record, so if I wanted to do anything with it, it had to be a solo thing. Now it has turned into a crazy project that is integrating lots of parts of my life and skills that I wasn’t really exercising Turning into an art project. Super excited about it!”
And so are we!
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Ricardo Baca is the founder and co-editor of and an award-winning critic and journalist at The Denver Post.
