Not too long ago, if you happened to wander into one of those shoreline clubs in Virginia Beach's party district, you might have seen Kenna with an electric guitar, playing with some of his local pals in a balls-out rock 'n' roll band. Then again, maybe you'd see him perched on a stool on open-mic night in some café favored by earnest songwriters, singing his own material and accompanying himself in time-honored fashion on acoustic guitar.
Well, that's all over. You won't be seeing either of these scenes anymore, at least not for the foreseeable future. You will be seeing Kenna very soon, though, if everything goes as planned. You'll hear him, too, on his soon-to-be-released CD, New Sacred Cow, by Fred Durst's Flawless label (distributed by Geffen).
But don't count on seeing a guitar anywhere within reach.
So what happened? Has Kenna, an Ethiopian-born singer-songwriter who came to Virginia by way of Cincinnati, given up his infatuation with rock music? Has he assembled his army of synths, samplers, and software in hopes of going techno?
Nope. He's as much a rocker as ever; he just wants to do it all with no strings attached, both in the studio and onstage.
THE IDEA OF ENO
Kenna acknowledges that this sort of thing's been done before, albeit by artists who flourished in distant and more adventurous musical times. “My record is a rock record,” he insists. “More than anything else, it exemplifies Brian Eno or early Depeche Mode or Kraftwerk. Those kinds of groups always seemed to bring an element of rhythmic music to light that you wouldn't necessarily get out of a straight rock or guitar record. They were interesting to me because of the way their music swung. It was a droning, powerful, linear kind of music, and that's what led me toward that side of things.”
There's a problem, though. When your feel is rock but your preference is keyboards, you lose something — the iconic power that an arm-twirling, neck-shaking guitarist can bring to the band. “It's oddly societal,” he agrees. “You don't have guitars, so you're not considered rock. Plus stringed instruments can do a lot of things that keyboards cannot do. For example, they're more emotional. Keyboards are flat: they're very much the same sound. But I've always understood rock to be a music that has lots of different forms, so we had to find a way to make the keyboards feel more analog than they are, so we can have the same kind of emotion that you get from guitars. That was our challenge when we were making New Sacred Cow.”
To this grizzled listener, Kenna's album feels like an update and fusion of Howard Jones with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. At times his voice conjures both Jones and OMD's bassist and front man Paul Humphreys. More critically, all three acts share another quality: an ability to infuse electronic parts with a very unsequenced, live-rock vibe. This is no accident, according to Kenna.
“When we wrote this music, we did it so that we could replicate it live,” he explains. “A lot of times people make these grandiose records, and then they have to have 90 people onstage to pull it off. Chad [Hugo, producer] and I made it so that one keyboard player could handle a good deal of it onstage and another keyboard player could handle the rest of it, and with a bass player and a live drummer we could get away with it all.”
Guided by this vision, Kenna put together a snapping, catchy set of material — ambitiously arranged at times (fragile harmonies and filmy textures in “Hell Bent,” urgent string parts in “War in Me”) but never antithetical to the notion of being played onstage. What's puzzling is that he should go to all this trouble despite his conviction that today's artists probably need not worry about performing live.
THE DIGITAL TRAP
“You can make a good song in your house and not ever have to perform it, because of all the multimedia aspects of life,” he insists. “I mean, listeners don't have to leave their homes either. They can watch a music video, and the guy's lip-syncing and doing a jig for you, so why do you need to go to his live show?”
So why did Kenna and his band — keyboardist and music director Jason Halbert, keyboardist Max Hart, bassist and synthesist Dave Giminez, and drummer Derek Wyatt — knock themselves out in rehearsal so they could play this stuff in front of people on their upcoming tour? “It comes down to what you, as an individual, want,” he says. “A lot of people who go into a studio to make a song don't necessarily want to connect with people. What I think is that many of these artists don't have anything to say; if they want to perform their music, that's just for themselves. It's a very self-indulgent time in music right now. On the other hand, I wrote my songs for people, and I will perform them for people. Giving to audiences is when I feel the best.”
That giving begins with the basics, which in Kenna's case involves two key issues: arranging the music so that it's not just a rehash of the record and coming up with a stage design that can convey excitement and facilitate performance without having a bunch of little Eddie Van Halens running around the bandstand.
ISSUES AND ANSWERS
For Kenna, the key was to build arrangements that exploit his live band to the fullest, thereby leaving as little as possible to onstage sequencing. Jason Halbert put it together by listening to the multitrack Pro Tools files and assigning parts to himself and the rest of the band. When he'd finished, all that remained were some percussion patterns, most built from sounds Halbert had assembled during his work with the Neptunes. These are played back in the form of a sequence on Emagic Logic Audio (running on an Apple Titanium PowerBook and output through a MOTU 828 interface), leaving Derek Wyatt free to play the bulk of the drum parts live. (There are guitar sounds in the mix as well, but those are artfully mangled Wurlitzer patches from a Roland JV-1080.)
For the setup, Kenna decided to counterbalance the static effect of keyboards by setting the drums off-center and encouraging Halbert and Hart to rock out as much as possible. They do so in part by strapping on vintage controllers: each spends part of the show with a Moog Liberation hanging from his neck. “We both have Liberations,” Halbert points out, “which were used on the record to create a lot of solos. And we're not trying to act like guitar players, sticking out our tongues while we're playing. We try to be a little more tasteful.” (Maybe so, but just in case they lose it and start smashing their Moogs into their Marshalls, they've picked up a third Liberation to use exclusively for parts.)
Then, of course, there's Kenna, whose job is to sing and cavort in front of all this. It's been a while since he's risen up from the studio shadows and out into the glare of stage lights. But even with the opening gigs of his tour creeping closer, he seems unfazed. As always, his confidence comes from the faith he places in his audience.
“What's really great is that this is such new music that we could do almost anything and not be afraid,” he says. “That's because, as far as I'm concerned, there's no ‘cool kid’ anymore. All the kids are cool. You see punk kids with Adidas listening to house, and that means they're listening to every music, from George Benson straight through to Wu-Tang. So we don't have to do the ‘new metal/rock-out’ type of thing with this music. There's no choreography, none of that. We can break-dance if we want to. That's how it should be. Music means so much to me, and it shows. I don't try to control it. I can't control it.”
