Press photo provided by Kai-Crowe-Getty
Singer-songwriter Kai Crowe-Getty has spent more than a decade fronting the popular rock band Lord Nelson. But in recent years, he’s been quietly crafting a more thoughtful style—very much along the lines of the exceptional James McMurtry—that stands in stark contrast to his rowdier rock catalogue. This new foray is on full display throughout his debut solo LP, The Wreckage.
“I’ve played in big rock ‘n’ roll settings for a long time, and I do enjoy that,” he says. “But this is a vehicle for a different avenue of songwriting that explores different things. I wrote this album’s songs while working through some catharsis. I’m not overly nostalgic, but a lot of these songs seemed to end up in that vein where you’re simultaneously looking back and forward.”
Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Nelson County, Virginia—about 40 miles southwest of Charlottesville—Crowe-Getty watched and learned from his musician father, listening to the sounds of Bob Dylan permeating through his house.
Those experiences ultimately led Crowe-Getty to an interest in playing music—and particularly in songwriting—about the people and encounters that could expand his worldview.
“I needed to really broaden that and meet people who are very different than me or who had these deep stories—that you could pick up a hat, you could get in a truck with someone, and he just builds his story, and you’re like, ‘that’s a song,’” he told me on the latest episode of The Load Out. “Trying to find the agency to make the stories kind of your own and find a way to put your own stamp on it. The real drug for me was, was chasing that feeling.”
Crowe-Getty spoke of hearing McMurtry speak about inhabiting, as Crowe-Getty put it, “a character in the song, and that the character may say things that you don’t agree with as the author, but you have to follow that muse, that character … and how it’s more interesting when you write about characters who aren’t the most clean cut folks.”
These concepts resonated with him and Crowe-Getty wanted to dig deeper than he ever had in his musical career. There indeed was another level to explore.
But adjusting to life as a solo artist has not been easy.
Growing up alongside his brother, Crowe-Getty played team sports. This shaped a love of playing music in the context of a band, which is why, he said, it took him so long to step outside of the comfortable confines of Lord Nelson.
“It took me this long to get to put a solo record out because I just love the experience of working on something with other people,” he said. “Whether it’s writing a song, putting a show together, getting in the van and driving all over the country—it’s like, it just creates a really weird and unique setup where you’re all sort of focused on the same goals. It doesn’t exist much in society and so that’s something I always liked to chase for a long time and still do.”
The entire experience of making and performing around the new LP The Wreckage has been a bit, well, weird for Crowe-Getty.
“I played a show the other night and, to me, like there was an audience, it was all super, there’s a listening room, they’re very attentive, they were locked in, and it was so weird for me because I’m used to playing with like a loud band where it’s general bar, hubbub or venue,” he noted. “It’s a little more rowdy, and that part has been taking some getting used to—audiences who really wanted just to listen to quieter stuff, who want to lock into the lyrics, who want to experience things in a little different way. And so that’s been a fun thing for me to get used to.”
Going solo, so to speak, has been illuminating on a number of levels. He found that, to a degree, the band dynamic was shielding him from giving each song its proper due.
“You can kind of hide musically in a band,” he said. “If you take another solo—let’s go, let’s keep it going, it’s very different than doing the solo thing. So, I think in the band context, not that I was ever lazy with my songwriting, but there were songs that I probably could have pushed myself more on, or could have taken more ownership to make it better before it went out. But I was like, ‘oh, the band loves playing this is a rock song, it’s great, it’s fun, let’s, let’s just, let’s do this.’”
And do this he has. The Wreckage has drawn raves since dropping last summer. Americana Highways said the album was filled with, “Good, well-constructed songs not whittled together but sculpted carefully.” And theAmericanaMusic.com Podcast noted it has “…echoes of Mellencamp, Petty, and Springsteen storytelling with driving guitar grooves.”
I asked Crowe-Getty to expound upon two songs that I found particularly interesting. We started with “Brass Angels.”
“That’s my John Prine writing prompt song,” he said. “It’s like the one that reminds me of Keith Whitley’s ‘When You Say Nothing at All.’ It’s just 12 lines. It’s the entire song…It’s one of the songs that just came out really quick, was like, how do you tell an entire relationship and the heartache and, and the aspiration, the romance and all of that in 12 lines, and so that was, it just all came together quickly…I had a couple of visuals for it that I was able to tie together, and then the relationship just sort of came out. I had overwritten it at first and went back to like the John Prine maxim of say more with less.”
The second song we discussed was the album’s first cut, the particularly satisfying Americana track, “A Southeast State.”
“That was one of the first ones for the project that was tracked. I found a photograph of my grandparents who I never met on my mother’s side, and I was just sort of drawing—sort of that history out and trying to piece together. It was not literal, but there are a lot of things from their era and that generation and then sort of dealing with loss within, within the family context, and exploring those themes and, nobody thinks about. You know, where they’re going to die. But there were several family funerals at Arlington National Cemetery that there’s a lot of nostalgia and history wrapped in there along with me trying to put some pieces together, just sort of fictionally.”
In leading Lord Nelson for the past decade, Crowe-Getty has already carved out an enviable period of artistry. But in this new career phase, he’s still writing about the people and landscapes around him—just on a deeper level.
We cover a lot of ground in a fascinating conversation with a terrific artist—discussing his career and more on the latest Load Out Music Podcast.