Checking in with frontman Kevn Kinney and producer Aaron Lee Tasjan ahead of the album release show at Exit/In
Drivin N CryinPhoto: Lisa Mac
The politics on Drivin N Cryin’s new full-length Live the Love Beautiful are indirect, but the record communicates anxiety without losing its classic-rock radiance. The first album of new material the veteran rock-punk-folk group has released in a decade, Live the Love Beautiful is a testament to the vision of its leader, singer and songwriter Kevn Kinney. Recorded mostly in Nashville with producer Aaron Lee Tasjan, it’s also a reminder that a pop sensibility doesn’t have to obscure the serious intentions of a songwriter who has taken a hard look at American society. Live the Love Beautiful, which features contributions from Nashville musicians including Elizabeth Cook, The McCrary Sisters and Jimmy Matt Rowland, never flags over its 44 minutes — it’s Drivin N Cryin’s best album to date.
What Tasjan has achieved on Live the Love Beautiful goes beyond sonic trickery, though he has given a great American band the kind of loving treatment they’ve always deserved. Kinney’s songs hark back to the 1960s without a trace of nostalgia, while Tasjan streamlines them with layers of guitars, vocals and keyboards. Live the Love Beautiful functions as an aural artifact and a piece of autobiographical art. It’s also a political statement whose troubling implications Kinney underplays.
“It’s probably a little less political than The Great American Bubble Factory,” Kinney says via phone from his home in Atlanta, referring to the band’s 2009 album. A native of Milwaukee, Kinney formed Drivin N Cryin in Atlanta in 1985, and moved back to the city in 2016 after a stint in New York. “We can’t fucking make bubbles in America. That’s insane. It’s about how to put America back into a frame of mind that isn’t just consuming constantly.”
I interviewed Kinney when The Great American Bubble Factory was released in September 2009. Looking back at his previous records, he said at the time: “They’re all kinda self-help records. It’s like a bargain psychologist, the guy at the end of the bar giving advice.”
A decade later in a world that has undergone massive economic and political upheaval, Kinney extols the power of individual dreams throughout Live the Love Beautiful. “It’s mostly a very autobiographical Kevn Kinney story — about me,” he says. “Trying to turn my brain off and just be happy is a constant uphill battle.”
Live the Love draws from power pop, folk rock and hard rock, and Tasjan’s production recalls his work on his 2018 Nashville-recorded power-pop masterpiece Karma for Cheap. A longtime fan of Drivin N Cryin who has played guitar with them on the road, Tasjan set out to capture the power of the band’s live performances.
“By the time I came around to their records, a lot of them just sounded very of-the-era to me — super-crazy gated reverbs on snare drums,” Tasjan says. “There were a lot of things sonically about the records that I felt defined them as late-’80s and early-’90s records. I was like: ‘Man, I wanna capture four guys playing a song down, and kinda make that the base of everything.’ ”
Kinney’s latest songs explore weighty topics like gentrification and the loss of idealism. Still, Tasjan’s production and editing proved essential in the creation of an album that evokes a long-lost era of advanced populist rock. Like Big Star’s #1 Record or the Faces’ Ooh La La, the Live the Love track “What’s Wrong With Being Happy” works on two levels: It’s both pure texture and a heartfelt song about waking up from the American Dream. The instrumental break that occurs halfway through “What’s Wrong” is a sublime moment in the history of guitar pop.
Drivin N Cryin sounds fresh for a band that has been around for nearly 34 years. The group’s guitarist Laur Joamets, a former member of Sturgill Simpson’s band who joined Kinney & Co. in 2017, lays into the music with vigor. Live the Love is the testament of a rock ’n’ roll lifer, which comes through on the record’s “Ian McLagan,” titled for the legendary Faces keyboardist, who died in 2014.
“ ‘Ian McLagan’ is also a song about Peter Buck, and it’s a song about Dan Baird, and it’s a song about Chuck Prophet, and it’s a song about Alejandro Escovedo,” says Kinney. “Peter Buck could’ve done Murmur and sat on a barstool the rest of his life and said, ‘I did Murmur.’ But he keeps reinventing what he does.”
Live the Love Beautiful out June 21 via Drivin N Cryin Records
Playing June 21 at Exit/In