Arts & Entertainment
Gabriel Kelley w/ special guest, Foreign Fields - Live at Eddie's Attic!
Doors will open at 9:30pm. Tickets will be $10 at the door.
The talented 27-year-old, GABRIEL KELLEY, raised most of the funds for his debut album with a Kickstarter campaign, but his manner of conducting his life and music runs deeper. The saga of how IT DON’T COME EASY came to be is one of steadfast determination and self-sufficiency and a commitment to doing the right thing—often against challenging odds. And, as Kelley himself notes, there’s a corollary: Even when the creative process isn’t a walk in the park, it’s worth the effort when the work is honest.
And it is. IT DON’T COME EASY is an uncompromising and heartfelt debut that, if it requires a category, would fit comfortably under “singer-songwriter.” In the best sense of that tradition, it doesn’t trifle with extraneous anythings: no wasted lines or unnecessary instrumental flourishes, just a communal effort from Kelley and his fellow musicians to, as he puts it, “serve the songs.”
The album was a long time coming—Kelley reckons “I waited six years to make my first album”—largely because its ten songs express a pretty expansive range of life experience. That includes a rural, working-class boyhood in Georgia, a total immersion living-abroad adolescence and an early adulthood spent—and subsequently walked away from—as a professional songwriter on Nashville’s Music Row.
“The first music I remember,” says the affable Kelley, “is what my folks played at home: Neil Young, John Prine, Cat Stevens, even early Santana and Leon Russell. I soaked all that up. And my folks were members of a community about 20 miles north of Athens, where people played old-time, pre-bluegrass music. I learned to play guitar at these pickings, in a big circle around a fire.” (The man who taught Kelley to play, Pat Shields, wrote the powerful lament “These Old Green Hills” on IT DON’T COME EASY.)
Woodshedding, Kelley began, as he says, “digging in”: writing, refining and shaping songs from the considerable experience he’d amassed in his 20-something years. And, miraculously, the musicians who would help him put it all into the grooves came forward, three generations of them. They include engineer/producer Neal Cappellino, whose credits include a Grammy® for engineering on Alison Krauss’ 2011 album Paper Airplane and work with Joan Osborne and Del McCoury; legendary Memphis picker Reggie Young (Elvis, Dusty Springfield); background vocalist Bekka Bramlett (Joe Cocker, Fleetwood Mac); Brad Pemberton (The Cardinals, Brendan Benson); Jon Graboff (The Cardinals, Noel Gallagher); Dave Jacques (John Prine, Emmylou Harris) and fellow recording artist Gabe Dixon (Paul McCartney, Supertramp). Kelley supplies guitar and harmonica.
IT DON’T COME EASY has now arrived, and it’s an authentic representation—and the logical culmination—of what Gabriel Kelley set out to do, on his own terms. Its organic feel proceeds directly from the autobiographical nature of the songs that comprise it and from Kelley and Cappellino’s observation that “There’s no point in writing or recording unless you mean what you’re saying.” Kelley’s close-to-the-land Georgia background and affinity for telling it like it is, simply and directly, inform both the music and sentiments throughout, especially on tunes like “See Ya Comin’” and “Goodbye Jesse.” The songs are all Kelley’s, with the sole exception of “These Old Green Hills”: “I was home a couple of years ago,” he says, “and Pat [Shields] played it for me, and I said, ‘I’m gonna put that on the record.’ I never did anyone else’s song before, but I did that as kind of a tribute to Pat, because of his influence on me.”
Like its dramatic cover (by award-winning designer Buddy Jackson), the album reflects hard work and time well spent. “The whole idea of that one guy plowing that big-ass field,” says Kelley, “is about energy and intention and focus. The field is so open, and it’s actually yielding something, and there’s all this sense of possibility…”
FOREIGN FIELDS is an electronic folk group that hails from the wintry plains of Wisconsin. New Years day of last year they met in their hometown, in an abandoned office building, to begin work on their first full length LP "Anywhere But Where I Am". Having no set plan or guide, the album grew naturally as they left their lives in Chicago for hot summer days, skipping stones in the rivers of Tennessee.
- Tickets -
