Low Stakes Band

The Low Stakes is what happens when two musicians decide they’re done with polite art and sanitized songwriting. Eric Colville and Ann Holbrook write and perform the way they live, unfiltered, a little defiant, and allergic to anything that smells like pretense. The name came out of a half-joking, half-serious conversation about how nothing in music is really life or death, but at the same time, every word you sing had better matter like it is. That tension between taking the work seriously but refusing to take themselves too seriously is the engine behind everything they do.

Their influences are a strange but intentional cocktail: the lyricism of Paul Simon and John Prine, the hooks of The Byrds or Tom Petty, and the irreverence of punk, not the cartoon version with safety pins and spiked hair, but the original, DIY, anti-establishment spirit rooted in honesty, skepticism, and refusing to play nice when nice isn’t honest. The Low Stakes isn’t here to write background music. Their songs exist to say out loud the things too many people swallow for the sake of civility.

That impulse to speak freely is no accident. It’s the product of a lifetime of watching people be told to soften the truth, round off the edges, or sanitize the language until it’s meaningless. A recent moment that perfectly captures this ethos came when a radio promoter told Eric that their song “5 Days Over” would need to be censored because of the word “goddamn.” That exchange became an unofficial line in the sand. If you can’t say “goddamn” about something that matters, what’s the point?

The Low Stakes songs live in the friction between humor and heartbreak, the profound and the absurd. You might move from a meditation on war directly into “#12”—a wildly sincere ode to the unsung hero of garment manufacturing: Underwear Inspector #12. “You poke around, stretch and pull / making sure that it’s all cool / and you do it so that no one else can tell...”It’s absurd, sure, but also kind of beautiful. Because that’s life: grief, joy, regret, love, and the ridiculousness of it all crammed into the same day.

They don’t write songs that sound like “songs are supposed to sound.” They puzzle as they please using internal rhyme, wordplay, and lyrical turns that reward anyone actually paying attention. Their music isn’t designed for everyone. It’s for the people paying attention.

If you’ve ever found yourself furious at the news, laughing at the wrong moment at a funeral, or wondering how the hell you got here but still kind of glad you did, Low Stakes is probably already writing your soundtrack. Their music feels like a conversation with the smartest, saltiest friend you’ve got. Someone who loves you enough to tell you the truth, even when it stings, even when it’s funny, and especially when it counts.