Kendra Smith Emerges From Decades of Seclusion to Sing on a new Dream Syndicate album, 2017.
Article:
https://medium.com/@davidchiu/kendra-sm ... 2da2f271b8Plus, here's a youtube link to the new song Kendra sings on,"Kendra's Dream":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvVLSNnEVm4David Chiu
Sep 13, 2017
Kendra Smith: A Musical Disappearing Act Reemerges
The reclusive singer, who hasn’t released new music in 22 years, makes a surprise appearance on the new Dream Syndicate album
“Kendra’s Dream,” the final track on the Dream Syndicate’s new reunion record, How Did I Find Myself Here?, is perhaps the most uncharacteristic-sounding song from the band. Aside from its moody ambient and atmospheric textures, a departure from the Syndicate’s dynamic guitar-driven rock, “Kendra’s Dream,” stands out because Steve Wynn, the group’s guitarist and main vocalist, doesn’t sing on it. Rather, it is performed by a female whose deep and charismatic voice recalls Nico, Patti Smith, and Marianne Faithfull. The lyrics are very stream-of-consciousness in its depiction of someone who is at peace with her natural surroundings and within herself (“I keep having the same dream/It’s a beautiful dream”), doesn’t follow convention (“I defy expectation, habit, law and repetition”), and perhaps thrives on quiet and solitude (“Lock of night is turned by this key/My hermit mind is not the same”).
This somewhat personal song off of the Dream Syndicate’s first new album in nearly three decades is sung by the reclusive Kendra Smith, the band’s former bassist, as well as the ex-singer for Opal, the group that later became Mazzy Star. Her appearance on “Kendra’s Dream” is a surprise for two reasons: It’s the first time she has appeared on a Dream Syndicate studio album in 35 years, and it also marks her return on a recording since her last solo record, 1995’s Five Ways of Disappearing. At the time of that latter release, Smith was living in a rural part of northern California in relative seclusion. “I’ve been living a low-key life and playing music at home,” she told Craig Rosen for Billboard in 1995.
In a recent interview with Slicing Up Eyeballs, Steve Wynn explained that he wrote words and added his vocal on an early version of “Kendra’s Dream,” but it didn’t feel right. Then he had the idea of having Smith sing on the track. “I got in touch with her, and at first I think she wasn’t completely sure she wanted to, for various reasons,” he said. “She hadn’t been doing records in a while, and also, none of us were really into the nostalgia trip. But I told her it wasn’t that. It would be great to work together. She came through…and she said, ‘I’ve tried something, I’m going to send it to you.’ She recorded where she lives, she recorded herself and sent me the track. I woke up on a Sunday morning with these six .WAV files sitting in my inbox…I couldn’t wait to plug them into the song and listen, and I went, ‘Wow.’ That is real. That was it. That was what the song needed. That’s Kendra.”
With the exception of The Days of Wine and Roses and Five Ways of Disappearing, the rest of her music, including with Opal, remains out of print. Before the new Dream Syndicate album, Smith’s lengthy public recording hiatus had some people speculating about her whereabouts online. (Coinciding with the release of that album, Smith gave a recent and very rare interview with the British music magazine Uncut). Now with “Kendra’s Dream,” Smith joins a select group of female cult artists who have recently reemerged after decades-long absences from either recording, performing live, or both: Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs, and the most famous of them all, Kate Bush. And like those artists, Smith has always followed her muse rather than having the music industry dictate her art. In the Spin Alternative Record Guide, Ivan Kreilkamp described Smith as “the Dream Syndicate’s Nico and Moe Tucker at once, smoky chanteuse and necessary time-keeper.” Her bass playing inspired Naomi Yang to take up the instrument when her band Galaxie 500 started in 1987. “I really admired her,” Yang told Pitchfork in 2011. “So when Damon [Krukowski] and Dean [Wareham] started to form another band and were looking for a bass player, I was like, ‘I want to try.’”
“Kendra was basically involved in two great bands, the Dream Syndicate and Opal, both legendary ’80s college rock bands,” says the writer Pat Thomas, who has worked on the Dream Syndicate album reissues, and is the author of the new book Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary. He is one of the few people who has maintained contact with Smith. “She becomes almost a bit mythological,” he says. “The only thing I can say about that is that it’s not calculated. It’s not like she purposely stayed off the grid for two decades so we’ll all be talking about her…she lives from the land, on the land, she uses solar power, pumps her own water, has chickens and donkeys, is very much living from the earth in the traditional way that someone would’ve done two centuries ago. That’s very important to her and very authentic.”
The sense of aura and mystery that surrounds Smith wasn’t apparent in the early part of her career. An Army brat from San Diego, Smith met Wynn at the University of California, Davis; both of them started a New Wave outfit called Suspects in the late ’70s. On the group’s spunky single ”It’s Up to You”/”Talking Loud,” Smith, who was the lead singer, sounded more in the vein of Pat Benatar than Nico. Her true voice wouldn’t emerge until her next endeavor.
After Suspects folded, Smith and Wynn formed the Dream Syndicate in Los Angeles with guitarist Karl Precoda and drummer Dennis Duck; this time Wynn served as the lead singer and Smith as the bassist. The group became the darlings of the city’s Paisley Underground scene with the release of the critically-acclaimed The Days of Wine and Roses (1982), an album whose noisy guitar-charged post-punk rock recalled such acts as the Velvet Underground, Neil Young, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. “The Dream Syndicate was the ultimate band experience,” Smith once said. “The music had darkness and humor, live performances were primitive and wild, and we played freely with improvisation and drone.” She only sang one track on The Days of Wine and Roses, the hazy and jazzy ballad “Too Little Too Late,” resulting in a cool and detached yet magnificent performance on the record.
But prior to the recording of the band’s major label debut Medicine Show, Smith left the Dream Syndicate in 1983 (“I could foresee that it had to be a space for Steve to do his trip, and I wanted to do more than play bass,” Smith told Gina Arnold for Option magazine in 1995). She later collaborated with guitarist David Roback, formerly of Rain Parade, on his album project Rainy Day, in which members of Paisley Underground bands like the Three O’Clock, the Bangles, and the Dream Syndicate offered their interpretations of ’60s and ’70s songs. On that record, Smith gave sublime and eloquent vocal performances on Buffalo Springfield’s folkish “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong,” and Big Star’s hauntingly stark ballad “Holocaust.”
Smith and Roback formed the group Clay Allison (which released 1984’s Fell from the Sun EP), which later became Opal. In 1987, Opal released its full-length debut, Happy Nightmare Baby, an underrated gem in which Smith’s languid and deadpan vocals played against Roback’s piercing, feedback-drenched guitar; that album’s sound channeled ’60s psychedelic pop with influences as diverse as Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, the Doors, and T.Rex. However, after a tour, Smith departed from Opal. “It was really apparent we were going in really different directions in a lot of ways: musically and in our approach to what music’s for, what you’re going to do with it, where you’re going with it. And Roback and I have really different ideas about how to do things,” she later told CMJ.
Singer Hope Sandoval took Smith’s place in Opal, which then evolved into Mazzy Star. Smith acknowledged her pattern of leaving bands on the verge of breaking out. “But I have to do that,” she said to Option. “The whole point is that I have to do things while it’s living and really vital — while it’s either doing something for me or fulfilling my ideas about what music should really be and do. Why waste time?”
After Opal, Smith relocated from Los Angeles to the woods north of San Francisco. There she grew her own food, relied on a solar panel for electricity, and used a stove for heat. In the evenings, she would play musical instruments such as her acoustic guitar inside the cabin. In 1992, she released The Guild of Temporal Adventurers EP, recorded with musicians Jonah Corey and A. Phillip Uberman. That record highlighted Smith’s use of the harmonium (or pump organ), an instrument Nico employed on her ’70s solo records. The German singer is an obvious comparison to Smith in terms of their singing style and avant-garde tendencies. “She’s pretty interesting, and she has been an influence,” Smith told Billboard. “She’s one of the cooler female artists, ever.”
The Guild of Temporal Adventurers drew the interest of British indie label 4AD, which signed Smith and released her first and so far only full-length record, Five Ways of Disappearing, in 1995. A cosmic and Gothic-sounding effort with stream-of-consciousness lyrics, Five Ways of Disappearing drew on Middle Eastern influences, such as on “Aurelia” and “Bohemian Zebulon”; and gentle folk on “Valley of the Morning Sun.” She even covered “Bold Marauder,” which was originally recorded by the ’60s folk duo Richard and Mimi Farina.
Following Five Ways of Disappearing, and her cover version of “Heart and Soul” for a Joy Division tribute album, Smith was never heard on another released recording again. With the exception of some appearances in New York and Hollywood, her last known public performance occurred at the Terrastock festival in San Francisco in 1998. “The crowd was very reverential,” says Thomas, who saw Smith’s set at that event. “It was one of the few performances where people didn’t stand. There was such an anticipation of the event that everybody sat down in a sort of respectful way.”
With “Kendra’s Dream,” Smith’s surprise appearance on the new Dream Syndicate album provides some sense of closure of sorts for both parties — Wynn called the track “the perfect coda to the record, tying up loose ends from the past and then opening them up again to the future.” This latest left-of-field return continues Smith’s streak of being unpredictable and furthers cement her cult-like status. “I really like to use luck and random factors and all the unpredictable things in making music,” she told CMJ around the time of Five Ways of Disappearing. “I don’t really like to overly plan what’s going to happen.”