About a month ago, I found myself attending an America concert. On a hazy August afternoon, I listened to those Laurel Canyon legends doing their greatest hits in a dried-up field amongst a thousand flower children, just as they were intended to be heard. Since then, I've had a penchant for the Laurel Canyon scene: Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Buffalo Springfield, and The Mamas and the Papas. I've been all over it. Of course, eventually you get sick of hearing songs from another time and place. You yearn to hear that kind of hit in a way that speaks to you and the world of today. Well, I got just that when Kendall Street Company put out their latest single, “Song for Colorado.”
Plucking guitars, soft drums, and simple yet powerful lyrics that exude love for the natural beauty of the American countryside. What more could you want from a song? It's easy listening, soft rock at its finest. Something to put on as you watch the sun set over the whispering bramble, a cool breeze blowing through your hair, and the warmth of the vanishing daylight on your face. It's a dusty back road twenty miles outside Phoenix, a creaky porch wrapped around a desolate farmhouse, and a somber walk down the main drag of a dried-up rust belt town.
Songs like this are easy to do but nearly impossible to do well, and yet Kendall Street Company cracked the code. It fills the listener with a nostalgic warmth, something that really makes you believe things might just be alright after all. This is a standard of songwriting I have yet to hear in modern rock. Throw a few vocal harmonies in there, and I'd believe you if you said it was an American song.
Take some time today to listen to “Song for Colorado,” and I don't mean half-listen to it in traffic on your way into work. Find somewhere quiet and serene to enjoy it. Get yourself something cold to drink and watch dusk settle in. Enjoy the natural splendor we've been spoiled with while Kendall Street Company puts everything you're seeing into words.
If you like “Song for Colorado,” you're in luck because Kendall Street Company has an impressive catalog for you to check out. After that, you can catch them passing through your town on tour, or if you're more of a homebody, check out their live album for that jam band style you can't get on a studio cut.
