Spotlight Album Review: The Kennedys "Headwinds"
With the onset of Covid-19, Pete and Maura Kennedy found themselves stymied, while touring was precluded. Famous road warriors, The Kennedys inaugurated weekly live streams, which drew hundreds of viewers and generated a repertoire of a thousand songs. Meanwhile, the changing times inspired a wealth of original songs, which have been released on their first album of new material in five years, Headwinds, which addresses both the environment and polarization.
“Political and social headwinds are making it hard to get back ‘home’ to our greatness as a nation,” Maura says. “We want to push back in a positive way against those winds.” Some of the new songs were incubated during several winters they spent in south Florida. The title track, based on a bike ride Maura took in the Florida Keys, acknowledges the changes:
It’s been a comfortable ride, with you by my side
And nothing to upset our home We took the good with the bad, we knew we had
A good thing going on
But time has a way and there’s a price you must pay
To travel this road alone And headwinds make it hard to get back home
The opening track, “New Set of Wheels,” is a classic car song a la Chuck Berry or the Beach Boys, perfect for a duo that’s travelled well over a million miles, but with the new reality of climate change (“Now I’m rolling with the times in my hybrid automobile/Yeah I’m back on the same old road with a new set of wheels”).
There is an environmental undercurrent to many of the songs. Sometimes it’s benign, as in “Late September Breeze.” Sometimes it’s more ominous, as in “Silence Is a Warning” (“It’s a little too quiet outside/Where there was a birdsong riot this morning/Now there’s a Cooper’s Hawk in the dogwood tree/Her silence is a warning”) or “The Sky Doesn’t Look Right,” which has a distinctly apocalyptic tone that’s like the Talking Heads “Nothing But Flowers,” minus the irony:
I haven’t seen the sun for weeks, I’ve lost the color on my cheeks
And all the trees are turning brown, though summer’s barely here
There ought to be a flower bed, a wreath of roses for my head
My garden growing things to eat, but nothing’s growing there
The Kennedys’ love of nature is reflected in Pete’s gospel-inflected tune, “The Woods and the Wild,” or the light-hearted tale of recycling, “Little Green Bottles.” Pete uses every instrument in his tool kit on the album, specifically organ and piano on “The Woods and the Wild” and piano and slide ukelele on the honky-tonk flavored “Little Green Bottles.” The uke is also heard on the jazzy ditty, “Tangerine,” while there’s steel guitar on “Sacramento,” a Western swing tune with echoes of Buck Owens, and “Donna,” a quiet ballad counseling kindness. And Pete pulls out the nylon string guitar for a taste of bossa nova, “Yolanda.”
Two other songs are in the classic folk-rock mode The Kennedys are known for. “The Boy from the East River Shore” is Maura’s reimagining Bob Dylan’s “Red River Shore” as a tragic gangland romance in New York City. The album’s finale, “Waging Peace,” is also Dylanesque, asking questions about the pervasive violence in our lives (“How many children’s cries/Will shatter the darkened skies ’til we beginwaging peace?”). That’s the essence of The Kennedys on Headwinds: looking reality in the eye, but with their deep compassion offering hope through music.