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It’s a Friday night at the Canterbury House and Kelly Caldwell has found herself, once again, in front of a pin-droppingly hushed audience. A single spotlight incandesces down onto her reedy figure as she grapples with an ever-so-slightly out of tune guitar. She lazily plucks away, singing her ultra-confessional, broken heart out with nothing more than a little banjo accompaniment. Her voice swaggers and sways like a lady Merle Haggard with a borderline yodel. But this is her. What you see is what you get. Sure, she might be better known to most as the front woman for Showdown At The Equator or as the rollicking female counterpart to Fred Thomas in Saturday Looks Good To Me, but with a new solo album and enough musical experiences under her belt to stand next to any avowed singer/songwriter-type, Kelly Caldwell has proven herself a true modern troubadour. “As long as I can remember talking, I can remember making up songs,” Caldwell says. Growing up in the Upper Peninsula, the product of dive bars and country records, Caldwell had a musical future that seemed predestined, no matter how much she denounced it at the time. “Country is so prevalent in the U.P. and I always hated it,” she says. “I remember just saying ‘Dad, turn it. I hate this shit. I hate Merle Haggard. I hate Kenny Rogers. It all sucks.’ And he was like, ‘Mark my words, you’re gonna love country music some day.’ And I was like, ‘The hell I will.’ But wouldn’t you know it. Now I’m like, ‘Dad, put on some Hank Williams.’” When she was just nine years old, she started a band called Savacald with her cousins. “My main influences at the time were Lita Ford, Poison, Warrant, and Skid Row,” Caldwell says. “Those were my bands. The first tape I ever bought was Cinderella. My mom was super freaked out because I was so little and I got super into this sexy glam-metal and it was all I thought about.” Savacald recorded some songs onto a little tape player and, ironically, the recording eventually got released on Ann Arbor’s We’re Twins Records over a decade later, giving Savacald a cult following. “A friend told me a story about having a Savacald button on his bag when he went to an interview in New York with some radio station,” Caldwell says, laughing. “The guy who interviewed him saw the pin and was like ‘Oh, Savacald! They’re cool. I always put them on my mix tapes.’“ Caldwell, just like every teenager with an acoustic, got her bearings playing the local coffeehouse circuit. She eventually moved to Ann Arbor, falling head-first into the local music scene. She started her first band, And Spiders, with friends, and the group began playing house shows and parties. The band recorded In The Woods, but dissolved just following its release. Soon after the disbandment of And Spiders, Caldwell formed Marigold Comedown, who played their only show with Flashpapr, a lo-fi, sadcore project lead by Fred Thomas. Immediately after they met, Caldwell and Thomas recorded her first solo project, Septembre Girl, and she began singing with Saturday Looks Good To Me. While touring with SLGTM, she joined Showdown At The Equator and started another project called The Black Forest Girls. “I was singing for both bands and then started the Black Forest Girls, trying to improve upon my solo project,” Caldwell says. “I originally started that band just wanting to make a Carter family-style, traditional country thing. I started listening to a lot of Gram Parson and the Louvin Brothers and a bunch of old country.” I know what you’re thinking at this point: Just what Ann Arbor needs—another singer/songwriting folkie type. But you’ve got her all wrong. This lonely, threadbare-hearted girl with nothing more than a twee six-string and a lackadaisically somber drawl can produce an earful of twang and heartbreak. “The thing about my songs is that for the most part, at least recently, they’re about boys and beer and heartache,” Caldwell explains. “I guess I’ve just had a rough time. My first album was really whimsical, but this album is really direct, y’know, like I’m fucking hurting, and I’m drunk all the time, and I’m getting older and I don’t know how to deal with it....You don’t realize it when you’re writing it, but then when you look back in retrospect, you’re like, ‘Wow, listen to my new album; every fucking song mentions drinking.’ It’s all so direct. It’s all so personal.” The new album, Banner Of A Hundred Hearts, is just that—personal and direct. It’s a kick-me-while-I’m-down cannonade of lovesick ballads that would make even Kittie Wells hide the razor blades. It is polar opposite from Septembre Girl. Rather than a cavorting, summery record with little else than Caldwell, her guitar, and Thomas’ irreproachable producing abilities, Banner Of A Hundred Hearts exposes Caldwell for the truly ethereal, beautifully cathartic songwriter that she is. “My first solo album I did pretty much with just me and my guitar and it was just one take,” Caldwell says. “A lot of the beauty in that album is in the production. Half of the new album is recorded with a live eight-piece band. No song with the band took more than three takes. It was one of the most beautiful musical experiences of my life to be in a room with that many people who I love and who are so talented.” And to complement the new album is Caldwell’s live show. Minimalist yet somehow complex, her performance captivates an audience with the bare essentials, capturing and holding the breath of every person watching. “I like playing solo a lot,” says Caldwell. “My voice tends to carry itself pretty well and if it’s a good crowd of people, I like having the power to get to them. The one thing a solo show lacks is the entertainment of musicianship. So a lot of times I’ll be up there playing a song and be thinking, ‘Oh, this is the part where there should be a guitar solo,’ but instead it’s just me crappily strumming.” (Apparently she’s not the only one who has her all wrong.) Caldwell can’t quite commit to one particular sound, but honestly, is that such a bad thing? From her Savacald days in the U.P., blowing a dollars worth on the jukebox playing Juice Newton’s “Queen Of Hearts,” to her insouciant days with Saturday Looks Good To Me and Showdown at the Equator, to her present state as a brooding, bottom-of-the-bar, singer/songwriter, even Caldwell herself is unsure where her next step will be. “The other day I was just like ‘Man, I’m just really into [Pink Floyd’s] Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and the first Roxy Music album. I wanna start a band that’s a combination of those two things,” Caldwell says. “Next I wanna be in a rock’n’roll band. I do. I’m willing to not even play any instruments and just sing and rock out because I’ve been listening to a lot of rock’n’roll lately, which is something that I shunned for a while.” As for now, however, Caldwell seems very content in where she’s at. Having recorded what she says was her best musical experience to date, she sees no signs of slowing, no matter which musical vein she chooses to course through next. “I’m just trying to get my music out as it comes out of me,” she says. “I feel better doing a shitty job on my own songs than doing a good job on someone else’s. As long as I’m the one making the music that I play, I’ll be happy.” A2P Kelly Caldwell’s new album, Banner Of A Hundred Hearts, will be available mid-March. Check the Paper listings section for upcoming show dates.
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