Maybe it takes a while to understand what you're hearing at an EverybodyFields show because your eyes and your ears are telling you two different stories. They are just too young to be making music this timeless.

On stage at the Press Room last Saturday night, Jill Andrews and Sam Quinn were swapping bass and guitar and vocals with easy harmony, guitar pick moving from mouth to hand to mouth. You want to say he's the leader, then her, but they are two inseparable halves of a whole. The songs are formed by the pair of remarkable voices, hers notable for its casual maturity, his for a reediness that seems to follow hills and curves in a road he's traveling in his mind. Their songs are very pretty, simple and sweet, and were complemented on Saturday by Jon Nolan on pedal steel and Dave Talmage (Mill City Ramblers) on fiddle.

The EverybodyFields music is touched with a bit of bluegrass, a bit of American roots, a bit of singer/songwriter. "Like a cousin of bluegrass that's married into the family," explained Quinn in an interview at Dos Amigos the next day.

The songs are slow and sad, with no apologies. Andrews likes the slow songs because you have time to think about the lyrics when you're singing. In "The Red Rose," they sing of a barroom in heaven, "a place men go to forget their wives," and they open the second set with a song that includes the lonesome lyrics "I can't sleep because I don't dream of you anymore."

Andrews and Quinn met working at a camp in 1999--they still remember the first song they sang together, "We'll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning"--and discovered they lived in the same town, Johnson City, Tenn. Fast forward a few years, moving in together, and an argument. Andrews goes to sing at an open mike with Dave Richey, "a guy I didn't like," noted Quinn. Quinn went to watch.

"Everybody really loved it. And there was this lady videotaping it, and she goes, "I've seen David sing with a lot of people and I think this is....' You know, something like that, and so I got really mad and drunk, maybe not in that order," Quinn said. "I went into the back room where they were after they stopped singing, and I played a couple songs for David, and he asked me if I wrote those songs, and I told him I did, and afterwards, we went back to David's house to this party, and I cornered him, and I told him I had to be in the group."

The trio has been a temporary duo for the last few weeks, Richey, the groups dobro/guitar player, went home to Oklahoma for the holidays. Their current tour brought them to Decatur, Athens and Chattanooga before coming to New Hampshire to play the Stone Church, the Dolphin Striker, the Barley Pub and the Loaf & Ladle.

The EverybodyFields are full-time musicians. They released their first album in summer 2004, then left their day jobs in the fall. After the show at the Press Room, they'll be playing the CanTab and Club Passim in Boston before heading to Tennessee to be reunited with Richey and begin work on their second album. They return to the northeast in the spring or summer. They're building a fan base around these two centers, Tennessee and New Hampshire, and hope to fill in the eastern seaboard along the way.

That's good news for fans back at the Press Room, who applauded them back on stage for an encore at the end of the night. "I would sell my soul to know how to harmonize like that," confided one musician in the room.