GRAEME KENNEDY - Singer and Songwriter (Folk/Storytelling/RockandRoll)
The world is noisy. To find his place in it, Graeme Kennedy set out to match the clamour. In the crucible of puberty, he picked up a guitar and discovered that volume and velocity, wielded just so, translate to a sort of power. How best to direct that power, well, that wisdom comes slower for some - through adulthood, sweat, work, love, fear, wondering what it’s all about. Writing songs, finding a voice. Fits and starts. Along the way, he’s garnered the attention of audiences and industry alike for that rare ability to bring the swagger of the stage into the studio and onto his records, and to conjure the intimacy of a darkened vocal booth in a noisy club. And how about his records? After almost two decades of tours and bands, he quietly set about making his own under his own name—smart, soulful, thoughtfully arranged, and with an attention to storytelling and craft that puts them in dialogue with a range of musical greats, from Nina Simone to Nick Cave. Older now, informed as much by early mornings with his kids as late nights in his studio, he continues to extend this body of work, which, for all its breadth of allusion, is greater than the sum of its inherited parts. He’s grown up some. He’s sure of what he wants to say, or at least steady in the voice through which he confesses his uncertainties. Go listen to him. See him live if you can. These are dispatches from an individual life, fleeting revelations of what it’s like to be a conscious man in unconscious times.