Watchhouse

Formerly Mandolin Orange
Band · Active 2009–present · Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Folk / Americana

Watchhouse is the songwriting partnership of Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz, a married North Carolina duo who spent twelve years recording as Mandolin Orange before adopting the new name in 2021. Their music sits at the quiet end of contemporary folk — Marlin's plainspoken songs carried by the pair's close harmonies, his mandolin, and her fiddle.

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  • Andrew Marlin (mandolin, guitar, banjo, vocals) and Emily Frantz (fiddle, guitar, vocals) formed the duo in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2009. The two are married.
  • Self-released their debut Quiet Little Room in 2010 and the EP Haste Make / Hard Hearted Stranger in 2011.
  • Signed to Yep Roc Records in 2013 and released four studio albums for the label as Mandolin Orange: This Side of Jordan (2013), Such Jubilee (2015), Blindfaller (2016), and Tides of a Teardrop (2019).
  • Changed the band name from Mandolin Orange to Watchhouse in April 2021. Marlin had felt the original name — chosen when he was twenty-one — no longer matched the songs he was writing, and Frantz noted the duo had come to feel boxed in by the implication that every song needed a mandolin. The new name comes from a stilted Chesapeake Bay cabin Marlin visited as a teenager, a quiet place he wanted the music to evoke.
  • Released their first record under the new name, the self-titled Watchhouse, on Tiptoe Tiger Music in August 2021.
  • Followed with Rituals (Tiptoe Tiger / Thirty Tigers) in May 2025.
  • Yep Roc released Austin City Limits Live at the Moody Theater in 2024, capturing one of the band's full-ensemble shows from the long-running Austin venue.
  • Tour both as a full band and as a stripped-down "Watchhouse Duo" featuring just Marlin and Frantz with the original mandolin-and-fiddle setup the band started with.

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