At some point in everyone’s life you learn to measure your hopes and desires against the reality of your situation. You have to still keep them separate in order to function daily, but each can inform the other. I think that heightened sense of self-awareness is the common thread in the songs from Virginian Kai Crowe-Getty’s debut solo album, The Wreckage. His day job, so to speak, is being the frontman for Lord Nelson, a rock and roll band from the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Over the last few years, though, he wrote some songs that just didn’t line up with the aesthetics of that band. Compiling them into a solo release gave him license to try some new things and match the instruments to the song instead of the other way around.
A good example of that is No One Breaks A Heart Like You. It’s a country ballad with perhaps the simplest arrangement of any cut on the record highlighting piano and fiddle. Dancing On A Razor’s Edge is another ballad with an acoustic feel despite the organ adding a somber mood. It’s an autobiographically-inspired look at losing a mother at an early age, with its accompanying emotional challenge “turning up the noise, turning up the rage.” The title cut hits the steel guitar right out of the gate in an ode to figuring out how to deal with life’s obstacles, particularly when you can see them in the mirror. Forks Of Buffalo also showcases that steel guitar in another ballad about lifelong dreams finally succumbing to reality.
As a note to the Lord Nelson fans, Crowe-Getty didn’t completely abandon the rock and roll for this project. In fact, the CD opens with A South East State, a guitar-driven homage to knowing where you’re from and not forgetting what was important then. American Radio could be a Springsteen nostalgia tale about growing up in rural America, where the main connection to the broader world was a 5-button, 2-dial device crammed into a car dashboard. Whole Damned World is acoustically a little gentler, but is still glorious anthem rock. When Crowe-Getty sings “as long as you’re beside me, I’ll be feeling like a king,” it’s a steadfast refusal to lose what you have.
Although Kai Crowe-Getty’s pedigree is rock and roll, his upbringing in rural Virginia instilled a strong sense of country music as well. His debut album, The Wreckage, winds between the two of them, sometimes swaying in the summer sunshine and sometimes driving pedal-to-the-metal through the night.
About the author: I've actually driven from Tehatchapee to Tonopah. And I've seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night.