Kelley Hunt

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Deal With It

Album: New Shade of Blue

Released: Jul 21, 2009

Label: 88 RECORDS

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Deal With It
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General Info

Genre: Americana / Blues / Indie
Location Lawrence, Kansas, Un
Profile Views: 71608
Last Login: 8/29/2011
Member Since 7/17/2007
Website www.kelleyhunt.com
Record Label 88 Records
Type of Label Indie
Bio
Kelley Hunt: Gravity Loves You Rare is the six year-old who finds it natural as breathing to dash over to a piano and pound out her own jumping, two-handed version of Ray Charles’ R&B groundbreaker “I Got a Woman” or Chuck Berry’s pioneering rock ‘n’ roll number “Maybellene”. Kelley Hunt was that little girl. Rarer still is what she grew into—a real, live roots R&B singer-songwriter. In the world of bluesy, bodily music, there are plenty of people known for their singing, or for their playing, but few recognized for songwriting. Hunt has a rich, full-bodied voice and knows how to use it; she can churn out authoritative grooves on the keyboard and be her own muscular rhythm section; and she can write—hot dance numbers and modern storytelling ballads alike—with the musical intelligence to absorb an array of early, plugged-in popular music and make it new. She does it all, gets fully caught up in it all and brings her audience along with her. On paper, Hunt is an independent act who’s made an impact in the roots world and beyond; a Kansas Music Hall of Famer who’s won over crowds from international blues and jazz gatherings to Austin City Limits Music Festival and Seattle’s Bumbershoot, performed on Prairie Home Companion no less than six times and sold close to 150 thousand albums on her own independent label. But no list of accomplishments could do justice to the bold spirit of what Hunt does, a spirit she’s channeled into Gravity Loves You, her fifth overall album and the third she’s co-produced. Recorded in Nashville with top-tier roots and pop players like James Pennebaker (Delbert McClinton), Mark Jordan (Van Morrison), Dave Roe (Johnny Cash), Tim Marks (Taylor Swift) and Bryan Owings (Shelby Lynne), the dozen originals spin narratives and conjure moods that leave no room for timidity. Though they’re a diverse batch of songs in theme and style, says Hunt, “they all get around to ‘You’re not gonna fall off the end of the earth if you just take a giant leap of faith. Do it. Like, do it now.’” The seeds of that attitude were sown by her uniquely unbounded and thoroughly musical upbringing. She was, first of all, born in Kansas City, Missouri, a place then still faintly buzzing with the downhome-meets-uptown energy of a blues and jazz scene that boasted the likes of jump blues shouter Big Joe Turner and boogie-woogie pianist Jay McShann. As for Hunt’s own bloodline, her mother sang on the radio with a jazzy vocal trio as a teen, and went on to steal the show with big bands and theatre productions in the region. “When I would see my mother sing,” Hunt says, “everybody in the place would go silent. Because it was almost like she lost herself. And I thought, ‘Well, hey, that’s how you do it.’” Her father played standup bass in the Navy, and later made his own proper washtub bass which, for the record, he still plays today. Each summer when a local jazz program drew musicians of all ages, races and stripes to town, Hunt recalls her parents hosting lively and diverse parties in their home, which inevitably evolved into jam sessions. And thanks to her older siblings, she got hip to Motown, Hendrix and Howlin’ Wolf early on in grade school. “The first time I heard Howlin’ Wolf I was in maybe third grade,” she laughs. “And it just scared the hell out of me and I just played it over and over. And the first album I ever bought, in fourth grade, was a James Brown album.” Prisoner of Love, to be exact. All during this time, Hunt was working out her own renditions of this exciting music on piano. “I grew up in an atmosphere where boundaries just didn’t matter and people were okay with the joyful aspect of musical expression, no matter what it sounded like or what style,” she says. “And I was fully accepted as a wild little kid that would just leap up and start banging out something on the piano. I was never told to tone it down, shut it up, never laughed at.” At 16, her brother’s friends drafted her to play keyboards in their blues-rock band. The moment of truth arrived the night their female lead singer was a no-show for a good-paying gig. “They said, ‘Boy, we hope you can sing, because it’s time to start. I was so scared. And I just pretended like I had no fear all night long.” From there to here, Hunt’s traveled quite the roundabout route. She studied music composition and voice at the University of Kansas for a couple years—leaving once she felt she’d gotten all she could from the program—gigged in bar bands, started a family and eventually realized what she really wanted to be doing—making her own music, and doing it her way. Plenty’s happened to prove that she was right to make that leap. None other than Johnnie Johnson—Chuck Berry’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame piano player—became her musical mentor. She made an album with legendary Nashville producer Garth Fundis and hitmaker Gary Nicholson, featuring a duet with Delbert McClinton, all three of them people who know a thing or two about the soulful side of roots music. And she found a perfectly unorthodox songwriting partner in Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. Hunt and Mirriam-Goldberg co-wrote the title track of Gravity Loves You, together dreaming up a wealth of empowering imagery. And the supple lifts and swoops in Hunt’s vocal performance drive home the idea that gravity (otherwise known as the possibility of failure) is, indeed, nothing to live in fear of. Throughout the album, she also demonstrates her songwriting agility. There’s boogie-woogie (“Shake It Off Right Away”, featuring three hot Hunt piano solos), old-school southern funk (“Too Much History”), percolating New Orleans R&B (“Deep Old Love”), blues-rock (“The House of Love”) and rockabilly (“I’m Ready”), as well as sophisticated singer-songwriter fare (“Music Was the Thread,” “This Fall” and “When the Deal Came Down”) and gospely anthems of uplift (“These Are the Days,” “In the End” and “Land of Milk and Honey,” the latter inspired by President Obama’s inauguration). In other words, it’s just about equal parts groove-centric and lyric-focused material, and that’s a satisfying combination. You can be sure of this: each time Hunt brings her varied catalog to the stage, she doesn’t phone in a bit of it. “Anywhere I show up,” she says, “no matter what’s happened to me that day or what’s on my mind or what the hell’s going on, the minute I’m there with people I’m completely with them.”
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..Kelley Hunt..recording artist/songwriter/piano/vocals/guitar....Lawrence, KS..
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