I met half of this week’s Listen Local pick just this week at Mean Thirst Mondays, a new open stage hosted by Chris Wynters at The Cask and Barrell.

Ryan Anderson was dressed in a black suit I recognized from his stage performances. It’s likely not the exact suit, but close enough to be on-brand.

He’d also seen me play, and remembered the bow tie. This weird stuff works, people.

Ryan was kind and full of the wisdom gained from experiences like playing 150 shows in a single year with his wife and musical partner Rebecca.

F&M play “folk noir” – a genre made up like “bowtie rock” to try and capture some unique edge of the music they make. And it captures their sound so well.

Their self-proclaimed “joyful melancholy’ is all over their just-released record, “Lessons from Losers.”

One track, “The Winter Lifts Me”, crept into my Spotify algorithm while I was painting my house on Saturday. The winter is coming, and these two get it.

“When I fall down, I always look up … for the start of a song”

Their writing is full of simple gems like “Time’s got me, but I’ve never got time” – the kind of line that seems too obviously clever to not have existed already.

Pair Ryan’s brooding vocal delivery and steady rhythm guitar with Rebecca’s operatic reveries and accordion and you’ve got a record doing more winning than the title suggests.

You can catch F&M at Empress Ale House on November 10.

“Turn up that song, it might save our lives”

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