Getting to Know. . . TERRY KITCHEN
 by Kathy S-B  ·  10 October 2007

Terry Kitchen is a familiar name to regular coffeehouse goers in the New England scene. He’s played here, there, and everywhere. He’s shared the stage with the heavy hitters of folk: Cheryl Wheeler, John Gorka, Vance Gilbert, and the Roches. As Scott Alarik of the Boston Globe says: “Terry tackles tough personal subjects with generosity of vision.” It’s this generosity of vision that led me to listen to his music and I hope that you’ll go check him out and go to see him when he’s in your neighborhood. Pay a visit to his MySpace page and listen to some of his tunes, and read all about him and buy his music at http://www.terrykitchen.com.

I happened to catch you do your song “Life is Hard Enough” on a workshop stage at Falcon Ridge this past summer. The song stopped me dead in my tracks. You’ve captured that sensation that so many of us have experienced — the desire to be our “best self” vs. taking the easy way out and carrying on without reaching out to help others. You’re so right: Life is Hard Enough. Thank you for writing this song. Have you had a good response to it?

Yes, a lot of people do seem to identify with it, and a lot of people have told me their stories of moments when they’ve helped, or been helped by, other people, maybe a simple little thing like giving somebody a jump start, or taking the time to say hello to a new person in the neighborhood, and how much those little moments can mean. It’s a big world, with big issues to contend with, but if we all make those little efforts to reach out to each other, we’ll be a lot closer to coexisting and solving the big problems.

Your newest CD “heaven here on earth” is your eighth recording. How long have you been plying your trade as a singer-songwriter?

Depends on how you count. I’ve always written songs, instead of keeping a diary or a sketchbook or whatever, ever since grade school. I was in rock bands in high school and college, and then in the Boston rock band Loose Ties (not to be confused with the Montana bluegrass band Loose Ties — we met once and traded albums, very fun) but it got frustrating that people in clubs weren’t really getting the words, the stories in the songs, so I started performing on the coffeehouse scene, and released my first solo CD on 1991.

It seems that many of your songs have a certain spiritual element to them. Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

I would say that I have a lot of respect for life, our planet and universe, and that it’s more important to me to try to live in way that respects the world we live in than to agree or disagree on how we got here. I feel my most spiritual, connected to the world, walking in the woods or by the ocean, when I’m taking the time to be aware of the beauty around us.

Your last CD “that’s how it used to be” had an ecological theme. What’s your take on the current state of the world and all the global warming nay-sayers? (is that a loaded question)

I think it’s obvious that we’re crowding out other species on the planet, through both our sheer numbers and our use of resources — land, water, coal, oil. Every time a square mile of rain forest is clearcut for agriculture or charcoal, or a mountain is leveled for mining, species are losing habitat and in many cases going extinct — we’re in the midst of the largest mass extinction in the history of the planet — bigger and faster than when the dinosaurs died off. People are noticing global warming, but that’s just one symptom. Very soon — like yesterday — we need to have a conversation about how many humans the earth can sustain and support, and we need to all work to limit our growth, in numbers and consumption, so everyone who’s here — including other species — can survive and enjoy a quality of life. The single scariest moment in the Al Gore movie is the projected chart of human population growth. The song “that’s how it used to be” is actually set in the future, looking back on the present, realizing too late what a paradise we have here.

Your list of musical influences is interesting: David Crosby, late Beatles, Warren Zevon, John Gorka, and Jules Shear. I’m especially intrigued by the Jules Shear influence. What is it about Jules that you find inspirational? He’s not exactly a household name and I was surprised to see him on the list.

I first heard Jules Shear when I was in college in Los Angeles in the late ’70s. His band Jules & the Polar Bears was based there and I saw them a number of times. His songs could be funny and poignant at the same time, and seemed to have a lot of wisdom in them. (One great song from that era went, “Sometimes real life is like real life, sometimes real life is just like you expect it,” deflating the whole ‘gusto’ mentality that every moment has to be a peak experience to be valid.) He moved to Boston for a while after his band broke up, and he came to see my band once, which was an honor but also somewhat embarrassing since we’d lifted a bunch of arrangement ideas from his records. I still enjoy his records, and he also performs solo acoustic now, and is very entertaining. He’s also been an influence on my songwriting, in that he’s a very honest writer and writes first for himself — he has to believe, and believe in, what he’s saying before he’ll put it out there, which I hope is true for me as well.