This week, Midday Music host Evan Miller interviewed Rayna Gellert and Kieran Kane ahead of their November 8, 2023 performance at the Foundry Theater in Yellow Springs. Gellert and Kane have recorded three albums together, most recently The Flowers That Bloom in Spring (2022). In the interview, the duo talked about meeting each other at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in 2015. Both acclaimed folk musicians, they told Evan that they were drawn to each other’s direct, minimal approach to crafting songs. “We have the same goal in mind, which is to get out of the way of the song as much as possible,” Gellert told Evan. They also spoke about their views on traditional American music and discussed writing songs together.
Rayna Gellert and Kieran Kane met at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in 2015. At the time, Kane, a veteran songwriter, rarely performed publicly outside of an annual gig at the fest with long-time collaborators Kevin Welch and Fats Kaplin. Gellert said she sought out the trio and was immediately drawn to Kane’s no-nonsense approach.
“All I knew was, a lot of friends had told me that I would like Kane Welch Kaplin, so I made a point of going to see their show. And when I heard Kieran playing, I was like, ‘who is that guy and why am I not playing music with him.’ Basically everything about the way he approached his instruments and his songs really was on my wavelength. There was nothing showy about it, it was really understated and it was really groovy. It was so accessible and so unusual that I went and pestered him after the set.”
While they quickly bonded over shared musical sensibilities, Gellert and Kane come from relatively disparate musical backgrounds. The daughter of old-time musicians, Gellert grew up in Elkhart, Indiana. She recalled attending Folk festivals as a kid, and began playing violin at a young age. For his part, Kane said he was drawn to Gellert’s abilities not as a violinist, but as a songwriter— a craft she started developing in her 30s. Kane, a 74 year-old New York City native, is well-versed in the world of songwriting; he spent years as a writer for Tree International Publishing Company in Nashville, where he penned dozens of songs and met fellow singer-songwriter Jamie O’Hara. He and O’Hara formed country band O’Kane, which recorded several hits on Columbia Records in the late 1980s, including Number One single “Can’t Stop My Heart From Loving You.” Kane went on to found independent record label Dead Reckoning Records in 1994.
After meeting at Hardly Strictly, Gellert and Kane quickly recorded their first album together, The Ledge (2018). Though their work together draws on American folk and bluegrass traditions, Kane told Evan that we should resist getting drawn up in genre labels:
“I’ve always gravitated toward all manner of roots music. Growing up as a kid in New York, the earliest first impressions of music were listening to Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and Little Richard and all those things. There’s still something so rooted about that. I don’t draw a hard line between different genres that are basically-blues based. I mean, old time music is blues-based really, and actual Rock and Roll is Blues based. And even if you look at bluegrass and listen to Bill Monroe, it’s all very elemental music. That’s what always appealed to me—a good groove and a good tune without too much adornment added to it…. And Rayna is very much the same way.”
Rayna Gellert and Kieran Kane perform together at Antioch College’s Foundry Theater on Wednesday, November 8, 2023. The concert begins at 7:00pm. Tickets are available on the Foundry’s website, or at the door. The duo’s three studio albums are available on Bandcamp, or for digital streaming. For more information about Gellert and Kane’s music, visit their website, kanegellert.com, or sign up for their newsletter on Substack.
Text by Peter Day, adapted from a live interview by Evan Miller from November 3rd, 2023.
