Guitar Noise

“she makes her guitar alternately weep, wail and scream, while vocally it’s hard to miss the large dose of soul seeping from nearly every note that escapes her lips.” – Cincinnati City Beat

Laura Lasley: Your joy in music shows when you play. And I haven’t even heard you play live! I’m just basing this on your CD’s and the Internet. Sadly you don’t tour over on the East Coast.

Kelly: We will, we will.

LL: I look forward to it! If you love an album, you are guaranteed to enjoy the live show. Live is so much more.

Kelly: We do 200-250 shows a year. We play a lot. We are getting all over the country. The East Coast is about the only place we haven’t been. Pittsburgh is about as far as we’ve gone.

LL: So how did you find your find your current band? How did you get together?

Kelly: I’ve been through quite a few personnel changes in the last few years, because it’s difficult to keep people on the road. Very few people’s lives accommodate this.

LL: Road life’s not easy.

Kelly: If you want a life, then pick a different career. It’s about that simple. Unless you have a lot of money, then you can do what you want. If you’ve going to try to put food on the table and roof over your head, and you play music, you’ve got to be serious about it. You better really have a passion for it, because it’s not easy. And every 10 years, everything changes. Do it because you love it. Since I’ve had personnel changes, I want to kind of sidestep that, because there’s not this core that I currently have.

LL: Do you ever perform solo?

Kelly: I do perform solo some. I do an acoustic solo thing. It makes me really focus on my vocals. It used to terrify me to play by myself. I’m so used to hiding behind my guitar and closing my eyes.

LL: I’m familiar with that feeling.

Kelly: I’m pretty naked with an acoustic guitar. I make myself do it periodically because it’s important to. You learn things there that you can’t learn anywhere else.

LL: One of the most amazing shows that I saw was Melissa Etheridge when she did her new album solo.

Kelly: I didn’t get to see that show.

LL: On one song she uses her boots on the stage to create the percussion and rhythm for her song. It just impresses the hell out of me that she’s so musically aware. It sounds like that’s one of the reasons that you make yourself go and perform solo acoustically.

Kelly: I want to, I have to.

LL: And always record it, because you pick up something from it.

Kelly: Yes.

LL: In terms of your song writing, you have some marvelous song writing. I also notice that you have some collaboration with other songwriters on your album. How did you hook up with those folks? Did you hear a song and ask them if you could do it?

Kelly: For the newest CD, the producer sent me, and this may be an exaggeration but I swear I think it’s relatively accurate, about 300 songs in two big boxes of demos. I went through every one of them very quickly, because either a song hit me right off the top, or it didn’t.

LL: Yup, either you love it or you don’t.

Kelly: Yeah. And I picked out about 20 songs that I really liked and then I sat down and started working with them. To see which ones fit me, which ones I could do something with. Then I put all of the songs that I had written or co-written on the table and we just picked the ones that were the best, that made sense to put together. I wanted to get a lot of my songs on the CD. But, you know…

LL: You wanted to pull the best out there.

Kelly: Right. I wanted the best CD I could make. If my songs stood up, great, and if they didn’t, well, I’ll keep writing them. It doesn’t mean I have to throw them away. So my evolution has been as a guitarist first, then as a singer, and then as a song writer. I’ll always be growing as a guitarist. Vocally and as a song writer, that’s a struggle that I bounce back and forth between. I really focus on my writing.

LL: Would it be fair to say your songwriting is still in a growth phase?

Kelly: One, I’ll always be, but two, yes.

LL: For singing and songwriting. It sounds like as a guitar player…

Kelly: I started out as a guitar player and I played for singers and song writers. And I was quite intimidated by them. When I got together my own band I got so sick of looking for vocalists…

LL: Well you have a great voice!

Kelly: Thank you. I’ve worked very hard at it. I was very influenced by Janis Joplin. When I first started singing, people took the microphone away from me and they were like…

LL: Don’t scream!

Kelly: I was singing everything RRRAAH, RRAAH!

LL: I love Janis, I love Melissa. The first song I ever learned on the guitar was Jefferson Airplane’s Somebody to Love. I can really belt it out. I can clip an amp.

Kelly: It’s raw and in your face.

LL: Exactly. I think that’s why I really love your music. It really speaks. I love the quote from the Colorado Springs Independent.

Kelly: “It’s not for the faint of heart”

LL: Yes! It’s for those “who have a deep-down red-hot soul and need something to keep it smouldering.” You music really just calls to that.

Kelly: There are a number of people that see us play a LOT. Sometimes I wonder what on earth are they doing here again. Aren’t you sick of me?

LL: NO!

Kelly: My fans say “it’s kind of like a drug, I need my fix.”

LL: Exactly.

Kelly: They say ” I’ve had a bad day, and I just want to come, and I know if I come see you play, I’m guaranteed to forget it all.”

LL: They don’t get sick of you. You have drawing power, it seems to me. That’s why they keep coming. You’re obviously giving them something that they need.

Kelly: It’s definitely a thing, an energy thing.

LL: It’s cool. That’s part of the music thing. It gives you that energy. It can drain it, but it can also fill you right back up. I was curious, especially writing for the Other Side, do you think that being a woman has affected how you’re treated when you perform?

Kelly: Yes, yes. When I first started this journey, it was extraordinarily difficult, and very stupid, the things that I ran into. The gender issues.

LL: Do you think it was because you were a guitarist first?

Kelly: Probably, because they didn’t have a slot for that.

LL: I know they don’t.

Kelly: I’d see an ad in the paper and say, Oh you’re looking for a guitar player! And they’re like, Click! They say, darlin’ you sound like a women. That’s OK we just filled the position.

LL: Oh No!

Kelly: And none of the boys in school would let me play with them. They were mean, so I grew up with a chip on my shoulder. That’s another reason I play with the aggression that I do. It hurt my feelings.

LL: Yeah it does! It’s hard to get the door slammed.

Kelly: Yeah, over and over and over again.

LL: And you’re thinking, “I know I’m good, why won’t you listen to me?”

Kelly: Once you do get out there and start playing, then you have club owners thinking “well darlin’, now you know I said I’d pay you this, but…” and I’m like, “I don’t think so!” So I had to learn to be a great deal tougher than I wanted to be. Right out of the chute. And again, that’s a chip on my other shoulder. I kind of grew up being a hot shot guitar player, because I got so few opportunities to really jump up there and play. When I did, I gave it everything I had. I gave it all away in a song. I had to learn to even that out. Chill out, step back and look at a show that I trying to present and make sure that it accomplished a journey and not just this one wham bam. It’s been fascinating to watch the view of women evolve such as it has. Lilith Fair, far out. I never thought I’d see the day. That’s a great accomplishment for all of us, women and men. I don’t have bad feeling against men. I think society is society and we’ve all had to learn.