Album Notes

"[Rob] Kendt's songs are each lovely works of literature--wonderfully constructed short stories, the likes of which you might expect in The New Yorker," wrote Rock City News of this eclectic, multi-instrumental pop song stylist, whose specialty is "character" songs with unreliable narrators: cranks, clowns, hustlers, outlaws, addicts, and otherwise upstanding citizens.

The former frontman of L.A. quartet Millhouse, Kendt freely incorporates rock, funk, ragtime, country, folk, and cabaret into his sound on record and in his live sets. His new CD, "i hope it's me," showcases the best of the rocking Millhouse era with more introspective new "solo" material. About his live solo set, a poster on the site Wolfesden.net wrote: "A vague approximation of the effect is Tom Waits if he'd never smoked - rich but battered images over a slightly dissonant, swinging background. Somewhere in the same outlying village as Brecht, k.d. lang, Michael Franks, and Bob Dorough - if a bit more wide awake than all of the above."

Kendt hails originally from Phoenix, Arizona. While studying film production at the University of Southern California, he scored a variety of films, including the work of such visionaries as Tim Doyle, Nina Menkes, and Susan Lambert. He studied briefly with the Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, and continues to moonlight in L.A. theatre productions as a composer/performer with such nationally recognized companies as Cornerstone Theater Company, Classical Theatre Lab, Pacific Resident Theatre, and the Evidence Room.

After the break-up of Millhouse in summer 2001, Kendt's solo music career has included the spoken-word-and-song cabarets Words & Music and Don Brekt's Soft Shoe Jamboree, in which his identical second cousin, Don Brekt, hijacked the stage to cover a wide range of Kendt's material and ramble about his unsavory past. Kendt is available for bat and bar mitzvahs, convention floorshows, cruiselines, company picnics, bathhouses, strip joints, steakhouses, and coincidental music for any occasion. He is flammable when wet.