Earlier this winter, I stuffed myself into an oddly-shaped room in a former Bushwick warehouse. The room was, at best, 6 people wide and about 80 feet long. It was a familiar scene, something I did throughout my twenties. But this time, I knew a bunch of people in the crowd — my punk-icana and queer country worlds colliding. You see, Paisley Fields had opened for Sammy Kay, just another of those musical moments I’d dreamed of way back when I started this blog, but doubted the day would ever come. Kay, Todd Farrell, Jr and Lydia Loveless squeezed around a microphone and sang their hearts out to this curiously-shaped venue on a cold Friday night, the late-night DJ set that would follow being the venue’s obvious priority. My heart sang. This is how it should be. Once, I thought, this is how it could be. Now, this is how it is.
Kay’s recent EP Inanna is a much less raucous affair, but it has the same feeling. Kay, John Calvin Abney, and Cory Tramontelli recorded their parts separately, in their own living rooms. The result is something hushed and intimate, with Kay’s homages to fellow Jersey-ite Springsteen flitting between Abney’s fey guitars and synths.
Inanna is lush with a sense of nostalgia and warmth. Kay’s “Couple cardinals,” as I wrote on The Boot, is a heartbreaking, haunted love letter to those who are gone. “You oughta know (revisited)” extends that love to a past version of himself as a relationship that should have been forever doesn’t stand the test of time. Kay’s cover of World Inferno Friendship Society’s “My ancestral homeland, New Jersey” takes the venom out of suburban boredom and converts into a hushed, reverential composition instead. Inanna is a small collection of songs, but mighty, and a must for all Adobe & Teardrops fans.