What Bern Kellys’ new stripped-down acoustic album Garden City might lack in decibel volume, it packs a punch in melodic precision and warm earnest singing. Taking the gritty tales and presentations of John Moreland and Hayes Carll, mixed with sonic textures that paint sepia images; Kelly has burgeoned into a vital American storyteller.
Garden City, is both a departure from his earlier work’s carefully arranged, densely layered indie rock and a distillation of his diverse musical influences. Kelly’s switch to exclusively using acoustic guitars on Garden City creates a sonic landscape with ample space, making room for his wistful, entrancing vocals and alternately wry and sincere lyrics.
Garden City finds longtime Nashville resident Kelly is embracing his hometown in ways he’d previously shied away from. “When I first moved here,” Kelly says, “I thought, ‘The last thing this town needs is another white guy with an acoustic guitar.’ But I figured if I was gonna jump into the Americana scene, I was at least gonna get a cool hat.”
Kelly eventually went for it, immersing himself in the Nashville scene, and as he did, he began to more fully appreciate the unadorned power of a singer-songwriter alone on stage with nothing but their voice, a guitar and a well-written song. But he wasn’t quite ready to hang up his electric just yet.
Garden City is Kelly’s response to the process of recording his lushly produced 2021 album, Fantastic Stories! “I got weird on that album,” Kelly says. “On each track, I kept adding, rearranging and layering.” The result was an intricate indie masterpiece—a tapestry of shimmering sonic textures intertwined with dynamic arrangements. But after diving headfirst into the minutiae of arranging and mixing Fantastic Stories!, Kelly found himself craving simplicity.
“I came across a recent acoustic record from Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief, songs, and it felt like a breath of fresh air,” Kelly says. “It was a freeing possibility compared to the complexities of navigating pre-production, figuring out who’s going to play what when deciding on band arrangements and spending hours engineering and mixing.”
Glide is premiering the texture-rich “Living Signature,” (below) an introspectively lush tune of retrospect and ’70s-influenced folk.
“The idea for “Living Signature” came while I was going through some old boxes of stuff to get ready for a move. I came across things I’d saved from almost my entire life up to that point; including pictures and cards from people who aren’t around anymore. Seeing someone’s signature or handwriting on a note has a way of momentarily putting them back in the land of the living. It was striking to see the ink and touch the indentation and for a brief moment made it feel like a living thing. The notion of what memories you have stored in your own memory bank has always been fascinating to me. Senses can trigger things in so many different ways. So this song is about digging through your past and visiting with the people you carry with you, who remain alive in your mind,” says Bern.
