The Kennedys

    Better Dreams

   Appleseed Recordings · APR CD 1107

Inspiration is where you find it – and where it finds you. Open to every moment, the much-traveled married duo of Pete and Maura Kennedy have spun their personal experiences, musical influences and philosophical beliefs into nine previous albums of winsome original songs, frequently seasoned with exquisitely-performed cover tunes, that blend acoustic-based folk, rock, country, pop and secular gospel into an inclusively delightful sound that’s all their own.

After celebrating some of their favorite “road music” by other songwriters on their previous CD, Songs of the Open Road, Pete and Maura have recorded Better Dreams, their first CD of all-original material in seven years, inspired by a pair of seminars they conducted on “using dreams to unlock your creativity.” “We found that we were writing really interesting songs in and around the workshop sessions,” they explain. “All of these songs have something to do with the dreamtime,” where “we have a different kind of freedom there.”

Time and space become fluid in the dreams The Kennedys have translated into these songs. The cleansing “eternal now” flows through the CD-opening “Breathe,” which counsels, “Breathe into a new life, breathe out all the old times.” The tricky path to love is illuminated on “I Found a Road” and “Light My Way.” Real life nightmares rush into folk history (“Sago Mine,” about the January 2006 mining disaster in West Virginia) or flood the modern day (both “Give Me Back My Country” and “American Wish” lament the draining of civil liberties in post-9/11 America). The dream state itself can be a lifeboat (as on the Eastern-tinged title song and “In My Dreams”), an exhausting anchor (“No Mornings”), or, to mix metaphors, an exhilarating rocket ride to a metaphysical sock-hop (“Speed of Soul”). Appropriately, the CD concludes with an ethereal, near wordless hymn to the ultimate dream – peace (“Pacé”)

Whatever the scenario, The Kennedys use their full palette of vocal and instrumental colors to bring their songs to glowing life. Maura’s lead vocals range from comforting to yearning, from girlish to womanly, from exuberant to delicate, sometimes bolstered by her own sweet harmonies and those of Pete and several guests. As usual, multi-instrumentalist Pete provides a vibrant tapestry of chiming, jangling and twanging guitars, as well as mandolin, keyboards, bass and drums, interwoven with Maura’s sturdy acoustic rhythm guitar, harmonica and glockenspiel.

You can also discern the influence here of two recent Kennedys side projects – there’s a new prominence given to the electric sitar and twinkling ukulele that are respectively featured elsewhere in The Strangelings, their “British folk/psychedelic” quintet, and in The Stringbusters, Pete and Maura’s ukulele duo devoted to jazz, classical and pop.

To again quote “Breathe,” listening to each new Kennedys recording is “just like being born, but you’re wiser this time.” Meaningful songs, gorgeous vocals, wizardly instrumentation . . . they all add up to better dreams – asleep or awake – for everyone fortunate enough to hear them.

About The Kennedys

In 1992, Virginia native Pete Kennedy was playing a solo show at Austin’s Continental Club on a brief sabbatical from his duties as country-folk singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith’s lead guitarist when he met former Syracuse, NY, resident Maura Boudreau, enjoying a night off from performing with her own country-rock band, The Delta Rays. The duo “instantly connected on a soul level, or maybe even something deeper,” according to Pete. They wrote their first song together the following day before Pete returned to the road, and rendezvoused ten days later at mutual hero Buddy Holly’s grave in Lubbock, Tex., 500 miles equidistant between them. And that’s how it started . . .

When Griffith needed a harmony singer to replace Iris Dement on short notice for a British tour in Spring ’93, Maura was the obvious choice, and her touring life alongside Pete began. While boarding the plane to England, Nanci informed the duo that they would serve as the opening act for many of the shows on her tour, as well as performing in her backing band. With a need for material to fill their set, Pete and Maura wrote an inspired set of songs in Dublin that would become the basis for their first album, 1995’s River of Fallen Stars, which earned an “Indie” award as “Best Adult Contemporary CD” by the National Association of Independent Record Distributors.

The body of work The Kennedys have created since their 1994 wedding is a reflection of their musical and philosophical influences and experiences separately and as a couple. A child of the ’50s, Pete was compelled to pick up his older sister’s guitar after seeing The Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and was soon playing “Louie Louie” and “Satisfaction” in a garage band while also absorbing the new sounds of The Byrds and folk-rock. After a year of studies at Boston College and with disco music just around the corner, Pete “started to lose interest in pop and got into taking the long view of the guitar.” He returned to Virginia and immersed himself in classical and jazz guitar, studying with master players Joe Pass and Johnny Smith in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The rise of the “alt.country” scene in the mid-’80s reignited Pete’s interest in contemporary music and he became a first-call session player in the Washington, DC, area. When fellow picker John Jennings took a sabbatical from his role as Mary Chapin Carpenter’s lead guitarist, Pete stepped into his shoes. On a final show with Carpenter in 1991 (on “Austin City Limits”) before she took a hiatus for songwriting, Pete sat in with fellow guest Nanci Griffith, was invited to join her band, and accepted.

Meanwhile, Maura Boudreau was learning there was more to music than pop when she started working in a used record store in Syracuse in the mid-’80s. There she discovered the British Invasion bands of two decades earlier, England’s groundbreaking folk-rock group Fairport Convention, and, most significantly, country-rock singer Emmylou Harris, whose recordings led Maura to the traditional music of Patsy Cline and the Louvin Brothers. She subsequently switched from playing Fairport-influenced material to forming the country-oriented Delta Rays and also started writing her own songs. A trip to Austin’s SXSW music showcase in the late ’80s convinced Maura to relocate her band there, although all but one of the original Delta Rays opted out of the move.

After Pete and Maura’s fateful 1992 meeting (the subject of their first Appleseed CD’s title song, “Half a Million Miles”) and several years of touring and recording with Nanci Griffith, the duo seceded amicably from Griffith’s Blue Moon Orchestra and became The Kennedys, recording CDs that encompass their favorite musical styles while incorporating the naturalistic, transcendental and mythological teachings of Joseph Campbell, Eckhart Tolle, Walt Whitman, and various Eastern-oriented philosophers into their songs and lives. Their goal is to live in the moment, appreciating every second of sensation, which imbues their music with a constant sense of wonder and freshness.

With the release of their tenth CD as The Kennedys and recent CDs by their Strangelings and Stringbusters side projects added to their discography, Pete and Maura remain the Energizer bunnies of the folk/rock world. Their touring schedule makes Bob Dylan seem lazy – they’ve played about 1500 gigs in the last 12 years, everywhere from house concerts to major festivals. And when they’re not recording, performing, or conducting monthly guitar workshops, they’re airing their favorite music on their “Dharma Café” show on SIRIUS Satellite Radio’s channel 70.