Making their long-awaited and overdue return to Live at Ted’s in Wilmington, North Carolina, the Kennedys found themselves buoyed on by a sold-out house. This was the last stop on their double-30th anniversary tour – 30 years performing together along with 30 years of marriage. The basis of the show was to play one song from each of the seventeen Kennedys albums, a script they may not have exactly stuck with but no one was counting.
Bounding on stage with the exuberance of an excitable NCAA women’s basketball player at March Madness, Maura Kennedy was as radiant as ever as she informed the audience that their first album, “River of Fallen Stars,” came out January, 10, 1995, and they wrote the songs while on tour in Ireland with their friend and mentor Nanci Griffith. They launched into the opening bars of the title track and for the next 90 minutes – split into two sets – it really was all about a musical journey through their lives as a couple. No new songs were played, not that anyone really cared as the uplifting ‘Common Bond’ (from “Angel Fire”), ‘Pick You Up’ (“Evolver”) about taking care of someone, the title track of “Get It Right” with a sweet segue into Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On,’ the glorious ‘Stand’ and ‘Half a Million Miles,’ about the odometer reading on their first car and having their first date at Buddy Holly’s grave are all dispatched meticulously.
The experience was the musical equivalent of a child in a sweet shop, wishing he could experience everything the duo had to offer over and over again. The biggest treat of the stunning first set was served up from the second album, “Life Is Large.” As Maura explained, “We set out on the road with a little portable recording unit, and as we went from town to town, we would call our musician friends and get them to be guests on our second album.” It was quite an impressive list: Steve Earle, John Gorka, Susan Cowsill, Peter Holsapple and Roger McGuinn who played 12-string Rickenbacker on the title track.
Only two songs in and it was apparent the songs weren’t being played in their usual succinct style. Instead, the salient point of emphasis was on Pete Kennedy stretching out with extended breaks and solos, clocking the two songs at around thirteen minutes. And the fellow who owns all sorts of classic guitars was playing an axe he picked up in a Florida pawn shop only two weeks before. It was striking and very much appreciated by the audience.
Harmony vocals and layering fills from a variety of stringed instruments are usually Pete’s main role in the studio and on stage, but one of the songs he wrote while touring some dingy Virginia clubs pre-Maura appeared on their “Positively Live” album. In one of those joints, he overheard a patron answer an obvious question with an alternate to the usual answer/question, “Does a bear poop in the woods?” with the evocative phrase “Is a bullfrog waterproof?” That became the punch line in the rockabilly song ‘Run Red Lights’ accompanied by Pete’s admonition to “be careful what you say around me because it might end up in a song.”
In the second set, every track rippled with atmosphere and energy. The songs didn’t merely represent the natural progression from album to album, they acted as the triumphant celebration of every album the Kennedys’ have released up this point, the most recent being “Headwinds” from 2023. Pete deftly switched gears to country guitar to back Maura’s sweet alto on the title track, a song which seemingly has its roots in Linda Ronstadt singing the Roy Orbison classic ‘Blue Bayou.’ “I always wanted to write a country song,” Maura disclosed, “like Patsy Cline or Tammy Wynette from that classic era of country music. When I wrote this one, I had Tammy Wynette’s voice in my head.”
It felt as if the evening of music had begun by digging up a time capsule that had been buried thirty years ago. The places the Kennedys have travelled are deeply embedded within them and their music, and it’s that type of personal divinity that makes a song like the rocker ‘Midnight Ghost’ resonate so well with lyrics such as “Working on our karma / take it as it comes / spinning out the dharma / in the cold gray sun.” That was as good as anything listeners are likely to hear from them anywhere this year, while the closing Beatles medley from “Abbey Road” turned into a spontaneous sing-along as ‘Golden Slumbers’ bled into ‘Carry That Weight’ on the nimble fingers of Pete’s galvanising solo. It was the perfect finale.
