Classical pianist and pop songwriter Kadie Kelly provides a uniquely immersive, organic listening experience, with the unplugged ambiances of her seven-track album Journey to Innocence.
From simple, solo piano beginnings, Anxiety offers up a surprisingly comforting introduction, before evolving through cleverly uncertain phrases and melodic fragments, for a near six-minute composition that brilliantly encapsulates the ebbing and flowing nature of unsteady nerves.
This style fascinates and connects, feeling original and focused on the theme, but also musically satisfying. And this quality continues for Eclipse, a beautifully unique composition, with a simple back and forth groove to the one hand, and a more meandering but recognisable melody to the other.
Fantasy holds the same humble prowess, but in a fresh way yet again. A sense of uncertainty, intrigue perhaps – a dream or idea on the horizon, quietly presented, with plenty of space; and again that rhythmic rise and fall to the lower notes.
Then for My Intention is to Tell Something, these aspects of uncertainty and mystique reach greater heights still, and the playing style of Kadie Kelly – this careful balancing of the familiar and the imaginative – is set in stone.
Legs is audibly gentler, a light stomp box and a strong dynamic between high and low notes, which seem to aptly be exploring their own strength and possibilities. Then for Won, the tempo rises, a rightful degree of celebration highlights the Kadie Kelly playing rhythm once more, for an uplifting piece that leads us quite wonderfully into the collaborative, quintet-featured closer Storied Generations.
Here we get wind instruments and hints of drama and energy from all around, a certain quietness exemplified by a group effort that rings louder or connects more intensely throughout this post-ten-minute work of meandering melodic and rhythmic unity.
Self-defined as composed from ‘the spaces where grief, wonder, tenderness, and fierce resilience meet’, Journey to Innocence delivers a timelessly engaging audio experience, and one that’s illuminated with both the personal anecdotes of a thoughtful artist, and the more broadly comforting waves of classical music that naturally soothe the soul.
Download Journey to Innocence. Find Kadie Kelly on Instagram & her Website.
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