By Nick Hopton Photographs courtesy of Bright Kelly
“Bring down that old record player we found, in that sorrow-strewn store, in that ten-dollar town,I’ll dig up something to move to, If you pour the wine”. It’s not very often that the opening lines of an album immediately draw you in and place you in a moment, not only in the life of the artist, but reminiscent of one of your own. It might not be that exact one that they sing about, but you’re moved somewhere with that familiar feeling. It’s a tough task to accomplish, but Bright Kelly has done just that. In his latest adventure entitled ‘The Quiet Ones’, Kelly is able to reignite not only the feelings of past love, but current as well. And in my conversation with him, I came to find out that love is what it’s really all about.
In a departure from his most well known musical adventure, local legends The Great Enough, Kelly created his newest piece of art out of one of the most primal natures that we all possess…necessity. What really sparked the creation of this as compared to doing another typical album? “Necessity being the mother of invention. I had no choice. The pandemic shut the band down. We all had our own individual spheres of life that couldn’t intersect safely, we couldn’t get into a room together. We tried to do the virtual way but it just didn’t work the way we wanted it to. So I had to think of a way to get some work coming in. I had this wealth of material that I was working with that I was streaming online, so I decided to narrow it down and build this EP.”
As we sat at a restaurant in Plymouth Meeting, nursing our cocktails on a Thursday afternoon, we began talking about how these five songs were chosen. Narrowing down was not an easy task, as Kelly has hundreds of songs written in his catalogue. Trimming that down to five tracks is half the work of recording an EP. You’re essentially creating a short story out of an encyclopedia’s worth of material. “At the end of the day, it was really about living up to what I wanted the album to be, which is The Quiet Ones. It’s partly a joke and partly the truth. These are the quietest songs in my catalogue. This is my rainy day record, my sit contemplatively record, my put it on when you’re sad record. It’s mostly a place of ‘embrace your melancholy’.”
‘Shake Till The Fever Is Gone’, ‘Apocalypse Driving’, ‘Phantom Heart’, ‘Lucas, Get Up’, and ‘I Wish You The Best’, would eventually be the tracks chosen to become ‘The Quiet Ones’. Songs that built a story of love and loss, sadness and hope. This EP, clocking in at only 16 minutes in length, is a perfect ensemble of emotions that create a sense of being home, no matter where you listen.
We continued on, catching up on the months and years since we had actually been able to see each other in person. From the first gig that we had played together at The Barbary years back with our respective bands, to now where nothing is the same as it was in the world…the little things never changed. Our mutual love for Bruce Springsteen, The Gaslight Anthem, The Replacements, and that gritty city called Philadelphia, it’s all still there and always will be. Kelly credits both Springsteen and The Gaslight Anthem’s Brian Fallon as massive influences in his storytelling and songwriting. That ability to hide the truth in plain sight. Shadowed lyrics of heartbreak told in an uplifting manner, or a love song written like a down and out hitchhiker created it. It’s a masquerade really. But out of that act, the truth eventually shines through.
“I don’t want my music to be mess free. Mess free is so achievable now, anybody can be perfect. In the age of digital recording, anyone can make a perfect sounding record…and that makes a perfect sounding record not something I want to achieve anymore. It’s not interesting. It takes a different kind of courage to do the best you can out of the box, out of the microphone, out of the guitar…and listen back and say to yourself ‘I’ve achieved the emotional goal I wanted to, I’m going to leave this alone”.
As we began to wrap our time together up, his phone that had gone undisturbed throughout the time we spent together suddenly lit up. It was a FaceTime call from his wife and his daughter. Immediately, his face lit up like the sun on a summer day. He answered immediately, and his happiness went to the stars. In the few minutes they briefly chatted, I was able to see in his face what all of this was really about. It really was necessity. It was necessity out of love. Kelly doesn’t do all of this because he has to, he does it because he needs to. He needs to write these songs and tell these stories because it’s his way of telling the world how much his family means to him. That unconditional love that you read about in fairy tales and see in romantic movies. That’s what they have. When the rest of the world is falling apart around them, they will always have each other…and that’s all they need. The Beatles really weren’t lying when they said “All You Need Is Love”. And after seeing that short call, I truly believe it.
The closing track on the EP, ‘I Wish You The Best’, ends with a line that resonates far beyond the song itself. With lyrics like, “I wish you the best, to go on forever like this, I wish you the best, wherever you end up going next”. I think we all need that kind of love in our life.
Check out his first single, “Apocalypse Driving” HERE
