Wasted Wine formed in Greenville, South Carolina in 2006 around the songwriting partnership of Robert Gowan and Adam Murphree, and twenty years later the partnership still writes everything. Both are classically trained multi-instrumentalists — Gowan a violinist who came up through folk tunes in minor keys and never left them (his favorite song is Greensleeves), Murphree a bouzouki player with a doctorate in sociology and roots in progressive rock. Between them they make something like high art assembled by hand — theatre-scale songs about ghosts, money, love going wrong, and who ends up paying for all of it, self-produced, patched together like a collage, and written so that a full room can dance to them.

 

The result is violin-led cabaret rock, with Maddy Hendrix's flute as its second lead voice: minor-key melodies catchy enough to serve as a second chorus, structures that open into long-form bridges the way progressive rock does, and rhythms that keep a brewery floor dancing the way folk music always has. On record the band arranges the way The Beatles did, with whatever the song requires — harmonium, accordion, celesta, and glockenspiel all appear across The Open Door. Onstage the four-piece (Gowan; Murphree; Hendrix on bass, flute, and vocals; Michael Leach on drums) trades instruments through the night, and the year's calendar runs from brewery dance floors to true cabaret evenings with burlesque and circus performers, four consecutive years at DragonCon, and long tenures at Greenville's Artisphere, Fall for Greenville, and Downtown Alive. Bob Boilen of NPR's All Songs Considered called them "a bastard child of David Lynch and Nick Cave."

 

The Open Door (2026), their seventh studio album, takes its name from the true story of Julia Legare of Edisto Island, entombed in 1852 behind a mausoleum door that afterward refused to stay closed. Some of these eleven songs have lived in the band's sets for more than five years; the record finally gives them a home worthy of the room they were built for.

 

Wasted Wine is: Robert Gowan (vocals, violin), Adam Murphree (vocals, bouzouki), Maddy Hendrix (bass, flute, vocals), and Michael Leach (drums).

 

The band performs across the Southeast and is available for festivals, listening rooms, breweries with courage, weddings, and private engagements. For booking and press: wastedwine@gmail.com. For everything else, the Emporium is open, and the door stays that way.