6 Songs (Solo Piano)

Ahead of their 16 date EU/UK tour, Palace Winter’s Caspar Hesselager leads a meditative retrospective with solo piano interpretations of songs from their past three albums.

After one EP and three albums, Danish/Australian alt-rock duo Palace Winter have rapidly garnered a name for fusing genres and crafting songs brimming with big, colourful melodies. In the lead up their 16 date EU/UK tour however, the trailblazing duo is stripping it all back to show how everything started.

They’ve been described as “country-kraut”, “cinematic-pop” and have admitted to drawing on influences like Kendrick Lamar, Ennio Morricone, and Little Richard. There are many elements that go into their widescreen sound, but Palace Winter’s keyboardist and producer Caspar Hesselager wanted to deconstruct their songs down to the bare bones.

“As much as I love the process of production and building entire universes from scratch for each song, there’s something extremely gratifying about playing ‘the core’, or bare bones of the song on a single instrument. Many of our songs are built from playing acoustic guitar and piano together in the same room, and whenever we’ve had the chance, we’ve always had so much fun just going back and re-discovering our songs in that setting.”

In 6 Songs (Solo Piano), Caspar Hesselager leads us on a late night, intimate meditation, playing songs from Palace Winter’s three albums. Included in the instrumental EP is “Soft Machine (Solo Piano)”, their signature anthem, reimagined in an ambient form.

It is also a moment for lead singer/guitarist Carl Coleman to step out of the spotlight, and for Hesselager to take center stage. Though usually providing the epic synth flavours that have helped gain Palace Winter much of their notoriety, his classical and jazz piano mastery is also something to behold.

Palace Winter embarks on a 16-date tour of Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK this fall. After releasing their third album ...Keep Dreaming, Buddy in the middle of 2020’s Covid turmoil, 6 Songs (Solo Piano) is a perfect re-introduction to Palace Winter’s back catalog, to warm us up for their first international tour in almost 3 years.