Gig Review: You, Me, Everybody @ Hokowhitu Bowling Club, Palmerston North – 21/03/2026

Touring the land in support of their recently released sophomore album Midnight, progressive bluegrass combo You, Me, Everybody wowed an appreciative audience in Palmerston North’s Hokowhitu Bowling Club, the venue increasingly becoming a home for live music in the Manawatu.

The choice to open with Power In Our Voices from the new album proved to be somewhat meta, as the power of the fraternal harmonies of brothers Laurence and Sam Frangos-Rhodes, augmented by Kim Bonnington, served to draw in attention from the first minute. The spell could almost have been broken by banjo player Nat Torkington’s technical issues, but thankfully endured through this brief hitch, moving in to the album’s title track, Midnight. A tale inspired by life on the road, necessitated to a degree by the far-flung domestic arrangements of the band members, this is led by Kim’s honey-sweet vocals, expressing the ever-present desire to “make it home by midnight” – but also a deeper meditation on liminality and the spaces between.

Watch ‘Em Go, one of Laurence’s songs, was introduced as a songwriting experiment, around an ambition of jamming together a selection of random words, (a bluegrass Burroughs, maybe?) but which ended up sounding surprisingly philosophical – all the more so as that wasn’t the intention at all! Leaning in to her apparent role as an unofficial Camp Mother, Kim filled in the time gap occasioned by Laurence’s busted string (on the guitar he made himself, no less!) by inserting a dad (mum?) joke – one that almost had some offering to help repair the string! The pace slowed a little for Winds of Change before another new song, The Ballad of Bubs and Beautiful, inspired by an overheard conversation in a shower stall in Waipukurau-a demonstration, if one was needed, of the diversity of sources that are drawn on to make this music.

The instrumental Sam’s Tune gave Kim a brief break from the stage, returning for Any Old Time – a song with the glorious harmonies to the fore, while serving also as an opportunity for each of the instrumentalists to show their skills. Quite the showpiece all around, really! Further to the earlier theme of a life on the road was Southern Sky, the title track of the first album, and one described by Laurence as being full of contradictions-having started writing it while on the road and missing home, but finishing it off when back at home and missing the road. Nobody ever said this stuff necessarily made sense!

‘Busy Without Me’, an expression of the desire for a rest (“Life can be busy without me”) led in to Silver Spoon, a dark tale inspired by a true story, the story of a distant relative from the past, perfectly accompanied by Sam’s plaintive violin.

While most of the songs were written by either Kim or Laurence, the rest of the band are no slouches in the songwriting department, as demonstrated by banjo player Nat’s Raurimu Spiral, an appropriately looping and circular tribute to the central North Island’s ferro-equinological engineering marvel. Further illuminating the compositional skills of the sidemen was bassist Rob Henderson’s She’s Alright With Me, which he at first threatened to sing, before passing this duty on to Sam’s superior vocalising. The theme of this song hinted at some good-natured contention among the players-does it discuss the blossoming of a friendship, or a failure to get lucky? Or both?

Coming in towards the final straight of this journey, it wouldn’t have been possible to avoid checking in with the band’s highest-profile song, Stranger, as featured on TV’s Sweet Tooth series, the subject of 300,000 streams and counting on Spotify alone, and an early example of what this combo are capable of. Followed by a trip through time to Misdirection, the lead track off Midnight, and a suitable closer to the main set. But there wasn’t even time to leave the stage before the call for an encore became too loud to ignore, the honours going to the night’s only cover, a rendition of Sierra Hull’s Come Out Of My Blues, which served as the icing on the cake for this night of pure progressive bluegrass, a genre criminally under-rated, if this band are anything to go by!

Having no doubt made some new fans, it was time to head for home, the prospect of being home by Midnight an extremely unlikely one, but all the better to bask in the ensuing liminality. There are still numerous dates to be performed, initially in the north and then heading to the Mainland, before the tour finally wraps in Ponēke in early July, so still a good few chances to catch the flame-and in this writer’s humble opinion, it’s well recommended that you do so!