Quick Q and A with Maura Kennedy (the Strangelings)
 by Kathy S-B  ·  8 March 2008

Pete and Maura Kennedy are mainstays in the folk world. It’s clear that they live and breathe music because it’s so obvious every time they are on stage playing their own music or backing up others on various workshop stages at festivals and conferences. Pete is a guitar (and sitar) god and Maura’s vocals are the stuff aural dreams are made of. It’s a great deal of fun to be able to catch the Kennedys wearing their various musical hats — their high-energy singer-songwriter show, their uke duo act, their children’s music entertainer and educator performances, and now this 7-piece Celtic-inspired folk-rock extravaganza called The Strangelings.
Here’s a video clip of Pete Kennedy talking about the band and playing Dave Carter’s “Tanglewood Tree.”

I love the whole concept of The Strangelings. Hearing you all work your magic on classic old tunes like “Season of the Witch” and “White Bird” is incredibly wonderful in that it introduces a whole new audience to these classic songs and the whole spirit of that era of folk-rock while still injecting it with a 21st century spin. It’s truly magical and inspiring. What prompted you and Pete to hatch this idea? You mentioned to me in a conversation at Falcon Ridge last summer that you decided to push forward with several projects after you had a scary car accident, right?

The accident changed our attitude about life, for sure. I think it’s easy to forget that life is fleeting and we only have so much time on this sweet, swingin’ sphere until something like that happens, and then afterwards, when you get a good idea, you go with it. Still, we hadn’t come up with the concept for The Strangelings until sometime after the accident. The real seed of it started when we found out that Meredith Thompson was going on maternity leave. She and her identical twin sister, Chris Thompson are favorites of ours. WE thought that we’d put something together with the two of them — We had a show coming up in January of 07 in which they were both going to open for us. We thought, let’s just work up a show together. After that, we figured Meredith would have her baby and we’d rotate other musicians into the band. Since we all have our own bands (we have The Kennedys, Chris has The Thompsons, etc), we may not all be able to do every gig. Our original idea was to call the band The Changelings, thinking that the lineup would be changeable, but that name was taken. As the repertoire developed, we decided on The Strangelings, which really reflected the mystical mood of the music.

You and Pete produced an awful lot of recorded material in the past year or year and a half: your own CD “Better Dreams,” a ukulele project called “The Stringbusters,” a children’s music offering called “The Snacks” and finally the debut album of “The Strangelings.” Where do you find the energy? Or do you attribute it to terrific time management skills? Do you ever take a day off?

Day off? What’s that? Never heard of it! No, it’s just that we love music, and we’d rather do nothing else. Free time is quickly transferred into time to work on yet another musical project. We love it. What else WOULD we be doing, anyway . . . watching American Idol?

Have you been able to determine whether The Strangelings are attracting a fan base that wasn’t part of the original Kennedys or Hall / Anderson or Chris Thompson crowd?

Yes, that’s quickly becoming apparent. We play a lot of traditional material in The Strangelings — rocked up, of course, but there are lots of fans of that music that want to see it kept alive and presented in a new context. The songs are fantastic — that’s why they’re still around. Songs like “Matty Groves,” “The Coo Coo,” “Johnny Come Down To Hilo” . . . these songs stand the test of time and they sound really good with electric sitar!

It was very exciting to hear you at Falcon Ridge, NERFA, and just recently at Folk Alliance. I think you blew a lot of people away who were not prepared for such a high energy and compelling act. Are any young kids who weren’t familiar with the original Donovan or It’s a Beautiful Day songs? I’d like to think that you have inspired some younger fans to check out the origins of this great music.

We get that at every gig. Usually teenagers come up to us and ask us about those songs, and they also want to know how we come up with the arrangements. Kids are really into music these days, and they’re not finding satisfying music from traditional sources as easily as we did when we were their age. They need to search it out, and they know what they like, so they search the internet, subscribe to blogs, listen a lot on line and find what they crave, musically. That’s where a lot of The Strangelings audience is coming from.

For those unfamiliar with your newest Kennedys recording, please explain the concept of “Better Dreams.”

“Better Dreams” grew out of a series of seminars that I led last year, on a friend’s request. I had told her that I wrote much of our song, “Stand” from a dream…that I was able to remember the verse and chorus when I woke from a dream of that song. She asked me if I could teach a songwriting seminar about drawing songs out of dreams. After thinking about it for a minute, I said yes, and within a month or so I had started a 6-week, once-a-week seminar on the very subject. We had a room full of songwriters finding new inspiration from inside their own heads. We first had to help them recall their dreams, and then experience lucid dreaming (where the dreamer is aware she is dreaming) in order to actively participate consciously in the dream — that’s when I’m able to write songs while I’m still sleeping. So all the songs on “Better Dreams” came out of that workshop and a second series that I held soon after the first, and of course, they all came out of our dreams! A very creative year for me as a songwriter.

Maura Kennedy photo by Dan Tappan