BIOGRAPHY
Music is not my life. Life is music. Songwriting is a way to express life and the music naturally follows. Words have tones. Phrases have melodies. Playing an instrument was a necessary evil to me at first. I learned to play guitar when I was thirteen. There was always a guitar around when I was growing up but I would have loved to play the piano earlier. I can hear the entire composition in my head so it was frustrating to pluck it out in a two dimensional version on guitar. I was intimidated by the piano for some reason and without formal lessons or someone pushing me it was just easier to play guitar. Though I would have been happier with a cellist, some congas and a candlelit stage my songs found a happy existence in the high-energy guitar sound of my first album, Dreaming of Oz. I found some really great musicians and told them to run with it. We ended up with a Paul McCartney channeled bass, Stewart Copeland-like drummer and Eddie Van Halen possessed guitarist that somehow inspired a Pat Benatar singing style out of my typically Kate Bush vocals. Oddly enough, it worked. Dreaming of Oz was like Sheryl Crow in a Crowded House on Sundays.
We performed around town and were very well received but it was Jacksonville in the 90's. I was really fed up competing with grunge bands and rednecks screaming "Play Freebird!". The clubs wanted bands to pay them to play there even when they had a following. In fact I was fed up with performing. I had given my cd to every successful artist I could get close to; Fred Durst, Puddle of Mudd, the Van Zants. After a bad experience with an actor-turned music manager who told me I didn't have soul because I wasn't black, I was too "Sheryl Crow" or I wasn't hungry enough, I decided that the music business was not for me, not because of him but because I knew I actually wasn’t hungry enough. I had two little girls that were more important to me than kissing wannabe music guru butt. I licensed music out to independent films and to Disney, but all together lost interest in promoting myself.
I started writing and playing again which is what it is supposed to be about in the first place. I moved with my family into a cabin my mother built in the middle of nowhere (not far from Tallahassee) and I began again. All my life I had really been annoyed by southern rock but there is such a raw honesty and a romance in southern soul, that it just cannot be ignored. It seemed like every time I sat down to the piano to play some of my older guitar songs this hot, steamy back woods sound kept oozing out and morphing them into something completely different and mesmerizing. With my own studio and Yamaha S08 I could experiment with different sounds and finally get to know the piano. There was a very strong sense of irony being out in the middle of nowhere yet having all of this creative-energy. The Amazing Nowhere Girl is the natural result of the songs that were born out of that condition. I was playing for the bugs and my dog, Paris. In the song "Yellow Fly" the thunder and the crickets were recorded in the background not as some cool effect but because I have no soundproofing in the cabin. I just went with it.
I write, I play but I am just a girl looking for a way to communicate the human condition, and inspire someone along the way. I am not one of those writers who won't tell you what the lyrics mean and say that it's open for interpretation. I’m a writer. I appreciate words and the way each word has a complimentary emotion to a complimentary note. When you hear a song just like anything else you come across in life, you interpret it according to your own experiences. But if you want to know where I was coming from, I am going to tell you. For me, that is the whole reason for writing in the first place, to share my perspective.
What’s next? You can find all my tunes at www.carikindl.com and homemade videos at www.youtube.com/cekmusic . Currently I am recording a new album called Phire in the Garden, a collection of simple acoustic tunes but it seems like the ghost of some old Indian gypsy wants to play on this album. As I will be collaborating with the old band mates it should prove to be an interesting new sound. We will see what happens when we re-KINDL the flame. Go to our new website at www.kindlband.com to listen to all of the music, old and new. Thanks for your support and for the love~
Cari Eden Kindl
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