KELLY KESSLER: SONGWRITER |
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Admire the world for never ending on you as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him, or walking away. -The wounds you do not want to heal are you. It's so funny when people put down art as not essential to a society, [from a London Observer interview of Arundhati Roy by Kate Kellaway] If I knew what I was looking for, it wouldn't be interesting.
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"Kessler's new originals get to the heart of country's mission: to wring plaintive emotions out of everyday situations and make them breathe with dignity." Marc Guarino, |
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“Nothing is bigger than life!” -Toni Morrison, on being told she was someone “larger than life”
There are stars in the sky that you can only see out of the corners of your eyes. It’s a function of how the rods and cones in your retina pick up light. When you look directly at some fainter stars they’ll disappear, but you can see them with certainty by gazing a little to one side. You just have to forego the comfortable state of holding them in full focus while you ponder them. Most of human experience seems to be too complex or intense, too potent or challenging, too something for us to just look right at it and get it. And yet day in and out we feel the pressures build inside and out to make sense of it all, to reconcile what is “supposed” to be happening to what the real world is dishing up. Some of the most difficult material we’ll deal with, the emotional weather that blows through with life’s ups and downs, seems to respond to a ritualized approach. When you’re at your grandmother’s house the afternoon of your grandpa’s funeral, does the umpteenth person coming through the door bringing a chocolate sheet cake do anything to directly relieve your pain at losing your grandfather? Of course not – nothing can do that. But there is comfort in this common ritual, in the rallying of your community. It brings home the profound fact that, while no one has the power to prevent aching loss, all of us share the burden of living with it. So the ritual is the bridge between those who want to show their concern when there’s no tangible way to help those who are going through hell. For me, that’s where country music comes in. It’s a ritualized way to address the messiness of life, to dip your whole self in it and come out the other side with a little of the burden you’ve been carrying washed away. Is it a perfect way to address pain, loss, frustration, disappointment, joy, hope? Far from it, but of all the vehicles available, turns out it’s particularly well-suited to haul this freight. I can be hurting for any number of reasons, and hear Hank Williams Sr. sing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, and feel better, transformed even. How does this equation add up? I feel bad, ol’ Hank felt bad when he wrote it, he sang it with all the pain in it, shouldn’t this just add up to a whole lot of feeling bad? He’s not even singing about the thing that’s got me so upset. How can this work out to a plus and not just a heap of negatives? |
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I love a good song. Long before I started writing, I already was enamored of the architecture and emotion that breathe life into the best songs. I've also learned that songs are frail: sing a song for the wrong reasons, or with less than all the conviction you can muster and you kill it dead. |
I subscribe to the "Radio In The Sky" theory: there's a big radio in the sky and it pumps out great country songs. The best part is that they are songs I've never heard before. Hell, nobody's ever heard them. So on certain days I'll slow down enough to hear these songs, or I'll suddenly remember: "Oh yeah, there's a big radio in the sky! Wonder what's playing on it right now?" and I'll try to tune it in and cut out the background noise so I can hear the signal loud enough to pull a song in. |
| There are catches. Some days I pull in a song and it's a good one but it bears no earthly resemblance to a country or bluegrass song. That means I'll spend a long time trying to figure what exactly to do with it. | ||
| Other days I'll pull in the most riveting chorus you ever heard, and then I'll wait for the rest of the song to show up. Sometimes it never comes. It just doesn't bother to show up. This bewitching fragment comes along to tantalize me but it can't be bothered getting the rest of itself all the way on to the planet, so we'll never know how the whole song goes. | I've sat down and forced songs to come. These are never good songs. I've been told that professional songwriters write on the clock, on demand, every day. That you can't wait for inspiration to come to you, you must sit down and work your way through. | |
But I've learned something different: what makes a song work is to get something said in it that is particularly true. Keep rolling it through your fingers till every note and every phrase adds up to that truth. Make sure the words and tune make it feel truer still because of how they feel in your mouth. Don't be afraid to let entire songs go because you can't get them up to this breaking point.
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I've had people cry at my songs because they rang true. That's hard to beat. I've looked up and realized that half the crowd is singing along to one of my songs - that is nearly impossible to believe, since the process of putting together a song is so private. How could so elusive a thing fly across a breach that's so daunting that each of us stumbles over it every day trying to reach one another? |
We are all born with a song in us, a song of who we each are laced with overtones of where we come from. We grow up hearing - and taking on as our own - another song, all clattery and chattery, of our family, our mores, our culture. |
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Most of us try to find a life of deeds that fit the clattery-chattery song. Some of us find that during the lulls we can hear our original songs and even at times the original songs of others. |
The clattery-chattery songs tell us how we are all so different from each other. The original songs make it plain we are all of a piece. |
There's
nothing natural about performing. When I first started performing
I was painfully shy about it. I wrote songs as true as I could, songs
of loss, songs of resilience. I was lucky enough to play with Jane,
who could deliver my songs beautifully and have the audience hanging
on every word. Most of the time when we played, you could hear a
pin drop.
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But those times when we were playing my songs and the audience wasn't with us, especially when I was singing lead, were horrible. It felt completely wrong, like a car with shot brakes careening out of control, to sing what was true with as much feeling and openness as possible - the only way I wanted to sing - to people who weren't listening. |
I've come to believe you have to have a form in place, a kind of structure that allows you to perform with as much of yourself as is possible without it being personal. I think of the deeply personal, the particularly true as being located right next to the universal. I try to write songs from that neighborhood and I try to perform from that neighborhood. | |
| It takes years of forging, of being in the crucible and burning off the trappings and clutter, the self-consiousness and defendedness, till you can walk on stage, tap into the spirit that drives you to create and pour it out unfettered to the people gathered there with you. | The form I have found - not original, but no less resonant - is that of a vessel. What bridges the gap between the personal and the universal? The truth as I know it. When I perform, I step across to the universal on the strength of the truth as I understand it, and I sing from there. I show up. And when I do that, the music is served. It comes through me. |
| Yes, I wrote it, yes, I play it but it can only succeed in reaching anyone listening because a key part of me gets out of the way and the night's work becomes about music and connecting, not about me. |
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