Their albums are souvenirs reminding Pete and Maura of old memories.
Not counting side projects, solo records and a retrospective, The Kennedys, Pete and Maura, have released 16 albums in an enduring career spanning nearly thirty years, an anniversary symbolized by pearls, rare and beautiful gems that take a long time to grow, similar to a long-lasting relationship. That’s a hefty catalogue of music to draw from as they continue their musical mission, which began at the Continental Club in Austin in the 1990s and blossomed from there both professionally and personally. This bond continues to get stronger with each passing year as they go from studio to touring to their home in Tarrytown, New York for their weekly livestream show while being sure to find the time to hike a trail or catch a sunset.
That lifestyle must agree with them as they never seem to be lacking in enthusiasm for the next adventure. If it’s not the next Kennedys album, Maura will work on a solo project; Pete will write another book. It all seems so, well, hectic, and stressful, but if it is they conceal it very well. Or possibly it’s just the impetus for getting out of bed every morning, ready to take on what the day has in store for them.
Arriving early one afternoon before loading in for a show that night, all sixteen albums were stacked on a table in chronological order. The mission: talk about each one as to what was going on in their lives at the time and pick a song(s) that represents what that particular album means to them. What transpired during that deep dive into their catalogue was an introspective and assiduous soundscape of their lives in music. Let’s call it the Essential Kennedys.
“River of Fallen Stars,” 1995 (Green Linnet): The Kennedys’ first album was recorded as a result of songs written in large part from impressions formed while in Ireland. That it was released on Green Linnet, recognized as a haven for Celtic and other folk musicians, may have elicited misconceived comparisons to the likes of Simon & Garfunkel or Peter, Paul and Mary, when instead their primary influences were The Byrds, The Beatles and Buddy Holly. How were two young musicians who had yet to make a record together able to go on tour in Ireland?
Maura Kennedy: Pete was touring with Nanci Griffith at the time, and I had my own sort of country band (The Delta Rays). Americana hadn’t been coined yet. We got together when Nanci needed a harmony singer to replace Iris Dement. We were opening shows for her 1993 UK tour. Before that, I hadn’t even been outside of the USA or Canada. In Ireland, we started writing the songs for “River of Fallen Stars.” The sound of the whole album is reflective of the landscape of Ireland.
Pete Kennedy: The first song we wrote was ‘Day In and Day Out,’ a kind of Everly Brothers song written when we were in Austin. It sounds just like Texas. The rest of the songs are from Ireland, which was so exotic to us and doesn’t sound at all like they came from Texas songwriters. We thought they may sound too weird for people but learned when you do something different, that’s good, that’s what people liked and it gave us an identity.
Maura had the idea to include some notes on the songs above the printed lyrics in the booklet. That provided insight as to their meaning, inspiration, and how they fit. What would be the one song that defined this album?
MK: I was singing in kind of a “belting” voice with The Delta Rays, so when we got into the studio to record the title song, for which Pete had written poetic lyrics, my belting voice just wasn’t working. Pete pulled me out of the vocal booth and told me I had such a nice speaking voice, just sing it like that. I thought, well, what’s that? Then I tried and it worked. It was a reset for me vocally and became the sound of the album, kind of ethereal.
PK: It’s a very evocative song. I wrote it as a poem with the exact same words. When I showed it to Maura, she picked up her guitar and sang it with the same melody that’s on the record. The song was about being in Ireland but not Ireland, it evoked the imagery there but not necessarily the green fields. I didn’t want to say anything literally about Ireland; I just wanted to express how different it was from Texas.
“Life Is Large,” 1996 (Green Linnet): The mod look is in going by the album cover. It wasn’t only the type of music they were into on each album, they had the look as well.
MK: We’ve always been fans of The Beatles. We were thinking of their songs and how so many of them are not written in the third person, instead they are directed to the listener. I want to hold your hand; She loves you. We thought, why not write the songs for this album like that?
PK: I think of these first two albums as geographical. The first reflects being in Ireland and the second comes from a solid year of continually driving around America. We consciously wanted to project American roots music, which is something we avoided on the first album. It felt as if we had come up with our own version of that, which you need to do. You can’t just copy Nanci Griffith or anybody else. You have to keep doing it night after night until you develop your own sound.
MK: ‘Right as Rain’ is a really good song that Pete wrote before I knew him. He played it at a pickin’ party like a Buddy Holly song. On the album, we put a sitar in and changed it to a raga.
PK: Around that time, we had a conversation with Roger McGuinn, who played some on the album. We asked him about ‘Eight Miles High’ because it had so many different sounds incorporated into it. Roger said The Byrds had deliberately tried to mix rock, folk, classical, jazz and Indian raga together in one song. He is someone we respected so much; it was like he was giving us permission to be eclectic. On the album cover, you can see The Byrds’ influence with me holding a Rickenbacker 12-string as a visual symbol.
MK: We had our own recording studio by then. It was bigger than what people have now, but we were able to take it on the road with us, so we had all kinds of guests singing on the album. Roger was in Florida, Peter Holsapple and Susan Cowsill in New Orleans, Kelly Willis in Austin, and Steve Earle at his house. He let us camp in the driveway.
“Angel Fire,” 1998 (Philo Records): Green Linnet and Philo are both known as folk labels, which isn’t exactly how you’d categorize The Kennedys’ music. Here’s the back story.
MK: When we were putting out “River of Fallen Stars,” people from Green Linnet came to see us play at this little Irish pub in Greenwich Village. They signed us on the spot. Even though they were an Irish label, they had started a songwriter imprint called Redbird and there was a slot open for us. Immediately the folk purists with the label didn’t like the album. Even though it was acoustic, it had wah-wah on the guitar. Then came “Life Is Large,” which was more like 60s pop with drums and bass, electric in any event. We didn’t want to repeat that sound so went back to acoustic for “Angel Fire.”
PK: Before I met Maura, I had been playing with Nanci Griffith for a couple of years and Mary Chapin Carpenter before that. Neither of them were into folk traditions. They had a kind of vintage rock influence and were just trying to be themselves, and totally unashamed about that. Like, if you don’t want to hear electric guitar don’t come and see us. Muddy Waters played electric guitar, Hank Williams had one, and Dylan did in 1965, so it wasn’t an evil thing. Anyway, even though we were on folk labels, we had more of a band sound.
MK: We had just bought a house in Virginia and were doing a lot of reading at a local bookstore. There are literary references on this record. ‘A Letter to Emily’ is Emily Dickinson. ‘Just Like Henry David,’ is Thoreau, of course. I don’t know if I can pick a song. What do you think, Pete?
PK: On the last album we tried to emphasize sounds like the Rickenbacker or the drone on ‘Run the Red Horses.’ For this album, we deemphasized that, wanting the lyrics to come to the forefront.
They considered ‘Bend in the River’ and ‘Feather in the Flame’ before settling on ‘Fire in the Rose,’ which Maura wrote about her mother. ‘Common Bond’ was also in consideration as much of their music has been about coming together, a concept that has taken a back seat to division in these times.
MK: When we play a show, we want to get people to forget about the news cycle for an hour or more. People get addicted to it. When we were kids, there were only three channels and no 24-hour news cycle. People weren’t as obsessed. When we’re travelling and stay at a motel, coming down to breakfast in the morning there’s always a TV on to either Fox News or MSNBC and CNN. No matter which network is on, half the people there are going to feel like, I’m the other or you’re the other. And I think, why not just put on the Weather Channel? It would be more helpful. I mean, we’re all travelling, why put division into our day?
PK: If you write a song like ‘Common Bond,’ you’re not encouraging tribalism like us against somebody else. We all share a common bond with the emphasis on all. When this record came out, people would ask why are you guys so encouraging all the time? We had a sense that it was eventually going to be needed and looking back we’re glad to have stuck with that.
MK: On the previous album, Green Linnet was sending it around to radio stations. Grunge was the thing at that time. They told us one station in Seattle wasn’t going to play the record because it didn’t have the level of anger they were looking for. Well, okay. There are enough angry people already.
PK: We are reaching out to whoever likes music, though we joke about being called The Kennedys. It’s our real name but it probably eliminates us to some people. It’s like Neil Young taking his music off Spotify as a protest against carrying Joe Rogan’s podcast. I don’t think you should worry about the choices people make; you just have to be yourself.
“Evolver” 2000 (Rounder/Zoe): Yet another folk label for the duo, though actually Philo and Rounder were part of the same company. Philo’s people complained this album was nothing like the last one – a Kennedy’s speciality – and Rounder finally passed it on to their Zoe subsidiary.
MK: This album brought a bigger than usual change, and not only from the Beatles album send-up. The pendulum swung back from acoustic to electric. We hired a photographer but looked terrible in all the shots. We did like the body language, however, in the one that made the cover, but we had really bad heads. On this album, we had a co-write with Bill Lloyd called ‘Keep the Place Clean.’ Actually, he just released his own version two months ago and sent us his new album. The song I like is ‘Girl with the Blonde Eye,’ an instrumental kind of James Bond thing we were going for, early 60s. Then ‘Here Without You,’ a Gene Clark song, is on there. ‘Down, Down, Down’ is like a Sandy Denny, Fairport Convention thing.
PK: I remember talking with Rita Houston, a DJ in New York, who was kind of the originator of this whole AAA songwriter approach. (This is the Adult Album Alternative radio format.) She’s not with us anymore, but Rita was brilliant about music. I once said to her that I didn’t know if our listeners really liked our new album. And she replied, don’t worry about that; you’re building a body of work. And that really stuck with me.
Skipping over “Positively Live,” 2001 (Jiffy Jam), which has just Pete and Maura, two guitars and two voices in harmony on 14 songs. A really solid live album, though. Next up, “Get It Right,” 2002 (Jiffy Jam): Despite being out on their own through the years, did they still keep in touch with Nanci Griffith?
MK: Nanci called me one day and said she had a problem with her fingers and needed surgery. She told me about this woman, Dickie Chappell, who was a war correspondent in Korea and then in Vietnam. Nanci had this idea for a song but couldn’t play her guitar, so she asked me to co-write. She sent me Dickie Chappell’s autobiography to read, and then we wrote the song ‘Pearl’s Eye View.’ She was the kind of historical figure Nanci loved, a really strong, independent woman. The overall sound of this album was leaning a little towards Americana. It has more of the Austin sound, which we never did on any of the other albums. We still play Pearl a lot. In our shows on this tour, in the first set we play songs from the new album, and then in the second set, we play requests. River, Stand, Half A Million Miles, Midnight Ghost: these are the songs people want to hear.
“Stand,” 2003 (Koch Records): This album was influenced by the death of a friend of theirs, the wonderful folk singer/songwriter Dave Carter. He described his music as post-modern mythic American folk. His unexpected death in 2002 must have hit them both very hard.
MK: Dave was a great songwriter. He wrote ‘When I Go,’ the last song on the record. He died so young; people hardly knew him.
PK: But he was a genius songwriter. We wrote ‘Elegy’ for him. His death put us in a more serious mode writing these songs. We weren’t worried about being stylistically mod or British Invasion or whatever. We were interested in the lyrics, and trying to interpolate things we picked up being around Dave was in a way mystical. That definitely gave a veneer to the record.
MK: ‘Stand’ interpolates, as Pete said, parts of ‘People Get Ready,’ which is pretty cool. There are a couple of different songs named ‘Stand’ that we thought were great, one of course being the Sly Stone song. There was a gospel song, also. I really wanted to write a song called ‘Stand.’ It’s such a powerful, monosyllabic word that could go anywhere. I don’t even remember this, but one night I must have woken up with a bit of a song in my head. So, I went to our recording studio and got it down, then went back to bed and forgot the whole thing. As we were putting this record together, we needed a couple more songs. Pete was going through tapes of raw material and started playing something. I said “What is that?” and he said ‘I think it’s you.’ So, Pete wrote the bridge and we kinda fleshed the whole song out together.
“Stand” is probably my favourite album by The Kennedys. There isn’t one cut on it that I’d call just okay. Did they feel its strength throughout after it was finished?
MK: We tried for that. We don’t always achieve it, but that’s our goal. On this album we were processing a loss, following this thread of mysticism we learned from Dave (Carter) and Joseph Campbell.
PK: We were looking at different spiritual traditions, not to try and get converted but to gain some understanding of why this friend of ours had gone out jogging and suddenly died. At the end of ‘Stand,’ we name all these various deities, and it was done deliberately, once again the common bond idea. We wanted to be able to look out at the audience and feel like we were singing to each and every person.
Like in their song ‘Raindrop,’ you get the impression that each one is unique, like snowflakes or people.
MK: We’re all part of a whole, whether it’s God energy or whatever it is.
PK: It’s like dying in a way when you say: “If my soul is a raindrop, I will return to the sea, If the ocean is timelessness, Let it watch over me.” There’s something universal and the only thing we can understand about dying is that maybe we go back to that universe and come out of it some way. Nobody really knows but it makes a dynamic idea for a song. It doesn’t answer any questions, but it invokes a search for answers.
“Half a Million Miles,” 2005 (Appleseed Records): This album was a terrific follow-up to “Stand’s” hard act to follow. One could make the argument these are the two best albums in The Kennedys’ discography, though their latest material would be coming on strong. Were they as satisfied with the album as I was from listening to it?
MK: “Half a Million Miles” was our 10th anniversary album. There’s ‘9th Street Billy’ and ‘Midnight Ghost’ has the big guitar. ‘Time Ain’t long,’ ‘Nuah’ about the moon goddess, and ‘Listen’ is a lot like ‘Raindrops.’ These are soulful songs with a twinge of Americana.
PK: ‘Midnight Ghost’ is my favourite. I used to listen to bluegrass music, the Seldom Scene and Bill Monroe. This was before Alison Krauss and this new kind of bluegrass that you hear now. Most bluegrass groups were expected to look back upon what Bill Monroe did, longing for that little cabin on a hill. It would be mostly about the migration from the South up to the North after World War II. That’s not really my context. Mine would be reading a Jack Kerouac novel like “The Dharma Bums.” Still, I loved bluegrass, so I wrote a bluegrass song based on a Kerouac novel.
MK: There’s a chapter in “The Dharma Bums” where Kerouac hops on a freight train heading to the Northwest so he can attend the first reading of “Howl,” the Allen Ginsberg poem that celebrates people on the margins. While they’re all sitting around a campfire, Kerouac describes them playing a song called ‘The Midnight Ghost.’ So, I thought okay, we’re going to write this. As for the character in ‘9th Street Billy,’ he’s a real guy who has people coming to visit him all the time that know him from our song.
PK: He’s like a guy you’d encounter on the street in the East Village. It’d be just like going to India to meet a guru, but he’s just a guy running a shop. We were living in the East Village at that time and naturally became influenced by the culture of the place.
This was the moment to ask about “Drummer – Stumpy Joe, Jr.” in the credits. Is he a real person? Whoever he is, the question prompted a lot of laughter from the other side of the table. Okay, what was so funny?
PK: Didn’t you get the joke? You had to have watched the movie “Spinal Tap.” There’s a drummer called Stumpy Joe (Eric Childs) who combusted spontaneously. All they found was a globule on his drum stool. Anyway, I usually would play drums on our records, though sometimes Vinnie Santoro or Robbie McGruder (who passed away) did. I thought it would be funny that instead of giving myself the credit to put in Stumpy Joe, Jr. Maura is saying to tell you about a name I came up with for a bass player. Yeah, it was Stu Voormann. Get it? Stuart Sutcliffe was The Beatle’s first bass player and Klaus Voormann came after him. I just combined two Beatle’s bass players to see if anyone noticed.
MK: That’s Pete for you.
“Songs of the Open Road,” 2006 (Appleseed Records): This one was recorded around the time of 9/11. What effect did the terrorist attack have on their songwriting for this record?
MK: We weren’t writing yet. It seemed too much to address all that. It was too big, so we decided to record some of our favourite songs by other songwriters. This became our covers album. We chose some songs that people would know like Dylan’s ‘Hard Rain’ and ‘Eight Miles High,’ but we picked others not as well-known like ‘Happy Town’ by Dave Carter, ‘Late Night Grand Hotel,’ by Nanci Griffith, and ‘Eye on the Road’ by Bob Neuwirth. He was Dylan’s friend. Also, ‘Jasmine,’ a John Stewart song from his later years and ‘Gypsy Rider,’ a more obscure Gene Clark song.
PK: It was a way of reaching out to our audience without being obvious or clichéd. We tried to come up with songs by Dylan and Stewart that people wouldn’t know quite as well, like the Victoria Williams song, which is great. It’s the deejay impulse where you want to sit people down and say you gotta hear this song.
MK: ‘Galveston,’ can’t forget that one. I heard that song for years and years before I really thought about the lyrics. The real tragedy of the song is … well, if you listen to Glenn Campbell’s version, the vocal crescendo, the high point of the song is when he sings, “I want to watch your seabirds flying in the sun.” That’s when you realize he’s so young, he’s more homesick for his home than for his girlfriend. He’s a kid in the war. That’s the overarching meaning of the song, that the tragedy of war is bringing kids into this place where they shouldn’t know about that stuff.
PK: Jimmy Webb has a knack for writing that ‘Galveston’ type of song. Like ‘Wichita Lineman’ is about a guy working on the electrical grid, but it’s really about his thoughts and what’s in his heart. ‘Galveston’ is not about the town of Galveston; it’s about a soldier in Vietnam and what he feels inside. It’s brilliant songwriting.
Before I forgot and moved on, the peculiar story from the liner notes needed to be brought up. Basically, it was the extension of the time Maura woke in the night and was being drawn to write the song ‘Stand,’ and how we don’t realize the power of our dreams until something inexplicable happens. They had just been married and were on honeymoon, hiking up Overlook Mountain in the Catskills when they came upon an old barn barely visible in the woods. As they walked through the brush, intrigued to find a barn in the middle of nowhere, they saw a hex sign on its door. As I was a little fuzzy on the details, Pete should take over telling the story.
PK: Well, you already know what happened after that. So, we should move on to the next album and get through all of them before soundcheck.
Which didn’t shed any light on what Peta and Maura made of the weird things that happened after seeing the hex symbol, but whatever. “Better Dreams,” 2008 (Appleseed Records): Since all the albums appear to have been classified, does this one have a name, too?
MK: In fact, it does. It’s our Dream album. We were at a show and I mentioned our song ‘Stand’ started out as a dream. A woman came up from the audience and said to me, “Can you teach that, writing songs from a dream?” Well, next thing you know, we drove to Boston to teach this workshop on writing from dreams, and all these songs came from that. In ‘Breathe,’ I dreamt I was inside my mother’s womb being born, and it felt so real that when I woke up my heart was beating really fast. In the dream, I didn’t know all this. It felt like dying. It made me realize that when you are born, you’re dying to a whole different world. No wonder babies cry when they come out of the womb. It’s a different way to look at birth. The other thing is there’s a kind of yoga in Buddhism where the yogi will sit with the dying person and sync their breathing, in effect breathing them into their next incarnation.
PK: It’s like “The Book of the Dead” is a training manual for death.
MK: When I wrote “I Found a Road,” I dreamt the whole song from dream writing. That was fun because it was in a lucid dream. I was in the audience watching Leslie Gore sing, and she was singing that song. That’s when I realized I was dreaming. When you’re lucid you can direct the dream, so I got her to sing it over and over, and it was fully memorized when I woke up.
PK: ‘Sago Mine’ is about the actual disaster that had happened right around the time “Better Dreams” was being put together. I wrote it from the point of view of a family waiting outside the mine trying to find out if their loved ones were alive. I played a banjo to get that old-timey West Virginia sound.
“Retrospective” was their next release in 2012, and it is exactly that, a compilation of songs chosen from all the previous albums. We can move on past that one to … “Closer Than You Know,” 2012 (The Kennedys LLC). They had moved back to New York at the time. By now I knew what to expect. New album, new theme or style.
MK: Once again, this one was born from a different process. When I write songs, I tend to use the same chord progressions and wind up melodically repeating myself. I remember asking Pete if he would record some musical tracks with interesting chord progressions, and then I’ll come up with a melody and a song over that.
PK: The lyrics didn’t come across like those on most of our other songs. That’s probably because I didn’t write any of the lyrics on this record.
MK: I listened to Pete’s tracks many times until I got an emotional response suggesting a lyric, Like ‘Cradle to a Boat’ has that cool kind of ‘Valerie’ guitar thing. (That’s the Tommy Boyce/Bobby Hart song written for The Monkees with that great Louie Shelton, Flamenco-style guitar solo.) I love ‘Home.’ It’s like our “Space Oddity” song, and ‘Big Star Song’ I wrote after Alex Chilton died. ‘Wild Honey’ is a U2 song. I love ‘Winter Lies’ because it’s this really cool, ethereal song that sounds like, well, winter. Pete described it as more of an organic album that reflected New York more than driving around the Southwest. I remember asking him to think in terms of a Burt Bacharach chord progression while he was recording tracks. Musically, it turned out a little more sophisticated than writing to just the I-IV-V chords.
Listening to the album again the next morning while just walking the dog(s), the structure on many of the songs sounded as if they had come from the pen of Cole Porter (‘You Do Something to Me’) or Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields (‘I’m in the Mood for Love’) or certainly a song most any jazz player or singer knows inside out, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ composed by Harold Arlen. What Maura and Pete had said about building the songs made sense.
PK: Actually, I’d been listening to Ennio Morricone, who wrote several soundtracks for films like “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.” And I had been listening to some jazz standards, too.
“Dance a Little Closer,” 2014 (The Kennedys LLC): The title is a giveaway. These are songs composed by their mentor and friend Nanci Griffith, recorded live. Griffith took pride in her songwriting as well as her knack for interpreting songs by other musicians. Undoubtedly, she was also proud of what Pete and Maura had accomplished, and the couple expressed their gratitude with this ardent tribute. Three years ago this August, Griffith passed away at age 68. Those who miss her can find comfort in hearing ‘There’s a Light Beyond These Woods,’ knowing that in passing she was drawn toward that light.
MK: Nanci wrote many songs about other people, but to me ‘Late Night Grande Hotel’ is autobiographical. She spent so much time on the road and often stayed in these big beautiful old hotels. The whole time we were on the road with her she was single, I wondered if she felt lonely, even though she always had a band with her, by not having a private relationship. She got what she wanted by growing up in a small town, which Austin was back in 1953. She desired the freedom of the road, but she learned there’s also a price to be paid. You don’t have a family and things like other people do, so she had to deal with that through her songwriting. After moving to Nashville, she supported a politician running for a Republican-held congressional seat. She was a social activist on many issues expressed in her songs. That didn’t sit well with some folks, which is a risk musicians take by publicly speaking out.
PK: One time we were in Lumberton, North Carolina playing a show when a guy stood up and began yelling at Nanci before walking out. She didn’t care. She was outspoken and political.
“West,” 2015 (The Kennedys LLC) Instead of Pete and Maura posing with their guitars, horses are pictured on the cover which makes this album a winner to the horse folks sitting at the table. (That is where an emoji of a horse would appear if the interviewer wasn’t clueless about using emojis. At least, that got a laugh.)
MK: This was my dad’s favourite album, definitely more roots-oriented. Someone asked us to play ‘Sisters of the Road’ tonight, which I’d better review since we haven’t played it in about ten years. I do like ‘Lockett,’ which is unquestionably a nod to Buddy Holly.
PK: I wrote the title song. We are East Coast people though we’ve driven across the country so many times. But each of those times it puts us into a different context culturally. Also, the terrain is so distinctly different. Since the album was going to be rootsy, I wanted to write an introductory song for it, you know, because we still think in terms of the sequence in albums. I don’t know if anyone thinks like that anymore. It’s like, “Siri, play The Kennedys,” and random songs start playing. But we think of an album like a novel where the introductory chapter sets the scene for the action to occur. So, I thought we would start the album with us literally travelling in our van out West.
That’s one of the reasons people enjoy hearing The Kennedys music so much. The songs are presented like novels. And why wouldn’t they? After all, Pete is a novelist, too, in his spare time, and there’s a poet inside Maura. Let’s resume the story with the couple in their van, driving towards the sun’s descent.
MK: And we do go West from there. We do a John Stewart song, then a song John Wicks wrote for us, and he’s an L.A. guy, well, English before moving there. ‘Good, Better, Best’ is the perfect closer for the album ‘cause it’s all about our life together on the road.
PK: And then ‘Elegy’ is about going back to listen to our friend Dave Carter’s music after ten years had passed since his death, after not wanting to hear his voice because it made us sad. It’s about trying to reconcile and reconnect with his songs.
MK: ‘Jubilee Time’ is one of my favourites that Pete has written. It’s like a Robert Hunter lyric.
PK: It’s sort of an Irish blessing, and the chorus is a quote from “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám”: “Lo, the bird is on the wing.”
Khayyám provided us with a lot to ponder in one short line. The bird being a metaphor for life and the fleeting nature of time as it relates to a lifetime of experiences. Stay in the moment and enjoy each one as it passes. We used the present moment to move on to the penultimate studio album with its ominous title. “Safe Until Tomorrow,” 2018 (The Kennedys LLC).
MK: The title song ended up being our theme song throughout the pandemic. I wrote it before that and, as Pete said, it found its context later. My mother and father both had dementia; my mother also had early onset Alzheimer’s. My dad died during the pandemic from Parkinson’s. There’s the line: “I do believe that you believe the things you thought you heard, and saw the things that made your heart beat like a thousand drums. Both my parents saw things, especially my dad when he had that Lewy Body. He saw things that frightened him and freaked him out like he was sure the clock on the wall was actually a portal to some evil place. So, the song is about trying to care for someone, telling them they are not alone and things will get better. Even when it’s not always true.
PK: It was our theme song in all the live streams we put up during the pandemic. If we can only keep you safe until tomorrow. What else can you say?
The Kennedys recorded a marvellous cover of ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ with some added flourishes indicative of their nature while remaining close to the original. The way they covered it was nothing like, say, how Vanilla Fudge bent and twisted ‘You Keep Me Hanging On.’ Pete, for example, wasn’t moved to begin with four minutes of droning psychedelics on his Rickenbacker?
MK: That was another case of us needing one more song to fill out the record. Most years we go up to New Hampshire to teach at a summer music camp for adults 18 and over. One year I taught a class in harmony singing. There was one student who was a choreographer and knew all the Motown dance moves. She asked if I could teach a Motown song, and she’d teach the dance moves to the class. I loved the idea. So, I came up with ‘Midnight Train to Georgia,’ which technically isn’t a Motown song. To prepare, I recorded the parts individually while Pete played the music. I never expected we’d put it out, but as we were going through all the tracks, Pete said it was so good we should put it on the record. Really?
PK: Yeah, definitely. Maura did all the vocal parts, including the backup. (She goes “Whoo-hoo” while I try to imagine her as one of the Pips.) You know, I played a gig once with Gladys Knight.
MK: What I like about what we do on ‘Midnight Train,’ we do the same thing on Pete’s song, ‘The Woods and the Wild,’ on our new album. When we’re playing it live, I’ll do the lead vocal in my lead vocal voice, and then I’ll sing the call-and-response back-ups in a different voice. (The Pips image is getting clearer.) That’s so much fun.
“Soul & Inspiration,” 2022 (The Kennedys LLC): The pandemic arrived and some musicians kept in touch with their audiences via live stream shows. The Kennedys announced through their newsletter they would be doing one weekly, and you could tune in just like you would for an episode of a favourite weekly TV series.
MK: We put out the album as a kind of souvenir record. We used only one microphone and there was no mixing involved. So, it’s excerpts from the livestreams exactly as they went out, and they’re all covers. Very simple. My favourites were the Summer of Love one and the space one, all the space songs. And the Motown one was good.
PK: Yeah, Motown was great. Like we were talking about with the old standards, to learn the composition of that music, well, Motown is not easy.
MK: We learned over one thousand songs during the course of the pandemic, from Burt Bacharach to Smokey Robinson, The Beatles, and Gene Clark. I would compare it to taking a master’s class in songwriting. You pick up all these little techniques here and there, and some of it might have rubbed off on the new record.
“Headwinds,” 2023 (The Kennedys LLC): Finally, we made it to their latest album, and the first thing that came to mind was: Is the title reflective of being held back by the pandemic like a river stopped by a dam, trying to gather the energy to break loose from the barrier and flow freely on its journey to the sea?
PK: We wanted “Headwinds” to be the title of the record because, at the time, the pandemic was just beginning to ease up. Everybody was trying to figure out what’s my life going to be like when I put it back together. It was no different for us because our lifestyle had been a lot of travel and social situations for so many years. Do we get to go back to that or is it going to be some reduced version? Also, there was the situation of the recurring mini-pandemics, when every time you thought it was over here comes a new strain. The headwinds were making it hard to get back home.
MK: And to harken back to Nanci’s ‘Late Night Grande Hotel,’ there’s a line Pete came up with: “Time has a way and there’s a price you must pay to travel this road alone.” When we played shows, people would keep saying the same thing to me, that they had to know how to reset. It’s been four years and people are still trying to reset.
One song that is particularly stirring on the new album is ‘The Boy from the East River Shore.’ In a way, the boy in the song has to deal with similar troubles as this young boy who lives with a family of drug dealers in the projects of New Orleans after his own family is wiped out in a fire. This takes place in the TV series “Your Honor.” starring Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad” fame as a judge who makes a series of terrible decisions. What’s going on with your East River boy?
MK: The catalyst for our song is from a Bob Dylan song called ‘The Girl from the Red River Shore.’ I have always liked the notion of “answer songs” like they did in the 50s, you know like ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-tonk Angels’ and the answer song was …. .
PK: That was Kitty Wells responding to … whoever made ‘Wild Side of Life.’ (This was a hit song by Hank Thompson).
MK: In Dylan’s song the woman is put on a pedestal, and I came up with the answer song, ‘The Boy from the East River Shore,’ because we were living in the East Village. But then I had to come up with an idea for the song, and I set it in a neighbourhood in the 70s when there was a lot of gang activity. The main character is the son of an immigrant. He gets in the gang and has this Romeo & Juliet kind of situation. It’s a tragic romance story, too. And I put St. Vincent’s Hospital in there because it had closed down, though I think it’s open again, but it was the main hospital in that part of town in the 70s. It almost didn’t end up on the album because I had to run it by Dylan’s people, and I knew to do that because the hook is similar to his. They are very powerful and I didn’t want to get sued. We sent it to them and didn’t hear back for a long, long time until about three weeks before we were going to press, they called back. I guess Dylan had to okay it and he did. I wrote both the melody and chords, leaving Pete to set the structure.
PK: I asked myself how would The Band play backing up Dylan? I wrote the different parts invoking how Garth Hudson (organ), Levon Helm (drums) and Robbie Robertson (treble guitar) would have done it.
MK: It’s a six-verse ballad without a chorus but that hook line is like ‘Tangled Up in Blue.’ In order to make it interesting, you have to add and subtract instruments and orchestrate it, which Pete did so well.
The Kennedys were being called to soundcheck before it got too late, and the interview had yielded more than enough material. It didn’t feel as if anything crucial had been missed.
If you have been to one or more of The Kennedys’ shows or watched their weekly livestreams, you may have heard some of these stories and inspirations for songs before. Still, they seemed fresh hearing them again, some with a different way of looking at a particular song or little details added to a story.
You haven’t heard what was left out of the tale of hiking Overlook Mountain on their honeymoon in the “Songs of the Open Road” section. That was the one about discovering the decrepit old barn with the hex signal on its door. They went in and found musical instruments covered with dust, illuminated by a single bulb hanging from the rafters. Maura picked up a flattop and Pete sat behind the drums. He pressed record on a nearby cassette deck and into the night they played songs listened to in the van on late-night drives. They jammed into the night before falling asleep. Awakened to the sound of monks chanting, they looked around and realized they must have hiked back down at night.
Six months later, they were driving the van across the Mojave Desert when Maura reached for her rucksack in the back seat, rummaged around looking for something and pulled out an old cassette. Well, you can guess where that cassette came from. As Paul Harvey would say at the end of each of his famed coast-to-coast radio shows, “Now you know …. the rest of the story.” But actually, you don’t, and that should make you curious.
There is more to the story and that alone is worth the cost of the album, discounted coincidentally since they are having a sale here on CDs from their back catalogue, including some that have been out of print, along with Pete and Maura’s solo albums. It’s the opportune time to pick up “Songs from the Open Road” and discover the real rest of the story before enjoying the music.
It is so cool how Pete and Maura pick up on each other’s thoughts as if they were thinking in tandem. That’s not implying they are like a couple who’ve been together for decades and start finishing each other’s sentences or stories. It’s evident they are two distinct individuals with unique personalities and a singular way of seeing the world and their place in it.
“This world is one continued vision,” wrote William Blake. And that vision has taken Pete and Maura half a million miles metaphorically. No matter how far they go, it sure feels good to know that The Kennedys and their songs are always with us, right here, right now.
An outstanding look at two remarkable artists.