Quick Q and A with Kelly Flint
 by Kathy S-B  ·  29 January 2009

Kelly Flint is making her debut at the me&thee when she opens for Bill Morrissey on February 13. You can hear a bit of Kelly’s music on her website and on her MySpace page as well. Another real treat is this video of Kelly and her husband, Jeff Eyrich, on bass — live on her home turf at the Living Room in New York City.

Your biography calls your music style as “postmodern folk with a tinge of Americana.” If someone asked you to compare your sound to someone else, who would come to mind? Complete the sentence: Kelly Flint sounds like

….hmmmm. I guess Suzanne Vega meets Patty Griffin.

Tell us about your years with Dave’s True Story. There are lots of stories about the fun songs and the interesting Cole Porterish delivery. Unfortunately, I never had the chance to see you in this configuration. Did you have as much fun doing this as it sounds?

Yeah, that was a fun-loving drunken sort of experience — lots of goofing around on stage with the sporting of much witty repartee. I always say that Dave’s songs are tongue in cheek, witty, highbrow and funny and my songs are not tongue in cheek, not highbrow, not witty and not funny at all.

Tell us about your Upstairs Sessions at the Living Room. You do a kind of talk show with visiting musicians. Any memorable moments that jump to mind?

I think it ends up being a somewhat spiritual experience both for the audience and the artist because we talk about things that a person just wouldn’t say in their stage patter . . . people talk about things they wouldn’t talk about unless asked. Often about the songwriting process or how they feel while performing or odd things that have happened or occurred to them along the road of being a songwriter/performer.

“Drive All Night” is your first solo CD. Was it a long time in the making? Were these songs percolating inside you for awhile — just yearning to come out and be heard?

Actually I wrote two songs in 1990 — Drive All Night and Marelena — both on the album and those were the only songs I wrote in 16 years — didn’t write another until the beginning of 2006. And then I wrote 25 songs over the next year and made the record in early 2007. I think singing Dave’s songs gave me a lot of inspiration in terms of song craft but made me really want to find my own message after awhile. Turns out I did have very specific things I wanted to talk about even though the subjects were a bit nerve wracking.

Doing a cover of the Moody Blues’ “Story in Your Eyes” was an inspired choice. Are you a big Moody Blues fan? Was it difficult to strip the song down and be able to present it without all the typical layered Moody sound?

It was the first song that I started playing after 16 years of not playing guitar and, no it was easy to record it stripped down because that’s how I got used to it in my kitchen with just my guitar and me. That was a song my dad really liked. He used to pick me up at school in a souped-up T-Bird with no muffler and that song blaring and I, being in 7th grade, was mortified. I used to tell him that I hated the song but secretly I liked it. And then it just popped out when I picked up my guitar on one of those first days when I started playing again.