Add multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, new traditionalist pioneer, beautifully banged-heart-throb, and record label founder Kieran Kane to my growing list of country music artists I had absolutely no inkling what-so-ever hailed from The Empire State.
Perhaps best known as one half of The O’Kanes, along with Jamie O’Hara, a highly influential but short-lived duo from the late ’80s and early ’90s, Kane was born in Queens, New York in 1949, the son of an Irish American sausage manufacturer. He would grow up further north in Mount Vernon, New York. There he banged on the drums as a young kid in a family band. Soon enough, he progressed to playing stringed instruments and became proficient on the guitar, banjo, and mandolin. Come university, Kane spent time at both Boston University and Suffolk University while living in Massachusetts. He became active in the northeast’s bluegrass and folk festival scene around Boston, having been inspired along the way by the music of bluegrass pioneers Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs.
He took his growing interest and excellence with acoustic string music to California in the early 1970s to work as a session player and songwriter, while playing in a band named Knuckles. Kane would not find his way to Nashville until the late 70’s when he was persuaded by county music star Deborah Allen and songwriter Rafe Van Hoy to give Music City a go. Kane quickly landed a staff songwriting job with Tree Publishing Company.
By 1979, Johnny Duncan recorded Kane’s composition “Play Another Slow Song,” on which Kane was identified in the songwriting credits as Francis Kane. The same year, TG Shepherd included Kane’s “I Came Home to Make Love to You” on Sheppard’s 3/4 Lonely album. In 1980 Kane would get another deep cut with Sheppard on his Smooth Sailin’ album with “I Could Never Dream the Way You Feel.” He would log his first songwriting number one hit as Kieran Kane with Janie Fricke’s “Don’t Worry ’bout Me Baby” in 1981. The song was jointly written by Deborah Allen, Bruce Channel and Kane; it also was Fricke’s first number one hit as a solo artist. Kane secured additional album cuts with Dave & Sugar, The Kendalls, and Ronnie McDowell.
Between the success placing his songs on other artist’s albums, and playing mandolin for a Jimmy Bowen run recording session for Hank Williams Jr., Bowen offered Kane a record deal with Elektra Records in 1980. Kane released an eponymous album featuring ten self-penned songs the following year, and he immediately ran four singles into the top thirty. The tempo and tone of these singles instantly bring to mind Don Williams. The debut single “You’re the Best” reached #14. The follow up single “It’s Who You Love” reached #16. The next two singles, “I Fell it with You” and “I’ll Be Your Man Around the House” reached #26.
He continued to place co-writes with other artists. Alabama recorded “Gonna Have a Party” on their Mountain Music album in 1982. Just to keep pace, the Oak Ridge Boys included “Doctor’s Orders” on their 1982 album Bobbie Sue. Kane moved his own shingle to the Warner Brothers label and pushed his next two singles “It’s You” and “Dedicate” into the top thirty. Meanwhile, John Conlee took Kane’s “Long As I’m Rockin’” With You” to number one in 1984.
I will now completely offend country fans everywhere, and do total injustice to Kane’s massive contributions to The O’Kane’s between 1986 and 1990, by skipping over their highly influential work only because The O’Kanes were so good they deserve their own Flashback feature.
Which finally brings us to 1993 and Kane’s Atlantic release Find My Way Home. Why spend so much time documenting Kane’s songwriting and singing success up until now? Because this album spectacularly stiffed. In a feature committed to celebrating quality whiffs, the vacuum trailing this miss still has haunted vortices whirling up and down 16th Avenue. It is where Kane’s train finally jumped the Nashville tracks, or perhaps more fairly, it is where Kane finally jumped from the Nashville train.
Kane maintains Find My Way Home had a large promotional budget. Different sources range between $200,000.00 and $400,000.00. Big money was spent on two high production-value videos. The two singles, “I’m Here to Love You” and the title track didn’t even chart. The end came so quickly that the label apparently failed to let Kane know that he had been dropped. Kane reports hearing from friends and fellow musicians on the street that he was no longer with Atlantic. When he called Rick Blackburn, the president of Atlantic Nashville, asking what was going on, Blackburn was reported to have said, “Yeah..I’ve been meaning to call you.”
To this day, Kane maintains he has never received any notification or documentation regarding his unceremonious release from Atlantic, just corporate country crickets. Which is incomprehensible because Find My Way Home is an amazing and essential ’90’s country album. It heralds the emergence of Americana. It is an honest and uncomplicated album. It is the beginning of Kane’s insistence that all is required to make good music is a great microphone and a great instrument. When asked how do you get that rootsy, rustic sound he said, “…well, you get a Fender Telecaster, plug it into a Deluxe amp and stick a microphone in front of it. It’s that simple.”
Some insanely tight and straightforward lyrics, reminding us of what brought him to Nashville in the first place, certainly help. Kane is the only writer on nine of the ten songs here. His vocals are clear, capable, and expressive enough to do some heavy lifting. The minimalist groove he creates with his mandolin and bouzouki is primitive and urgent. That being said, there is also a sense of quiet and calm introspection throughout the album. The entire collection sounds genuinely great as it leans into a more unpolished and lean, often acoustic aesthetic. Like so many of the best of 90’s country it is a contemporary interpretation of traditional sounds. Just as Nashville was getting big, here was Kane demonstrating what could be done with less, honouring the simplicity of negative space in a composition. Kane and drummer Harry Stinson co-produced the album. The commercial failure of their work is a good example of the Japanese proverb that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
I love the grovelling sentiment of “If You Only Hurt the Ones You Love (I Must Love You A lot.” “Greener Pastures” reminds me of Lyle Lovett’s “She’s Leaving Me (Because She Really Wants To)” in its brutal, hysterical, and blunt recognition of where a lover has gone to. The propulsive drive of “Return to Me” is hard to hold back. The misguided optimism and assumption that there will be another opportunity in the failing relationship of “Maybe Next Time” somehow still sounds genuine. My favourite is the album’s closer and the one song Kane didn’t write, “The Room at The Top of The Stairs.” Written by Randall Hylton, the song was first Recorded by Ralph Stanley. It is a haunting song about a mysterious and isolated woman, perhaps a prostitute, and the man who soothes his pain through her tender touches. The song’s intimacy is elusive and fragile. It hangs in the darkness amidst the wounded loneliness and cigarette smoke of her room.
Maybe Kane needed this commercial flop to find his artistic way home and fully free himself for his coming independent work as the founder of the Dead Reckoning Records label, the future home of Mike Henderson, Kevin Welch, Harry Stinson, Tammy Rogers, Fats Kaplin, The Fairfield Four, Dave Olney, Big House, and Charlie Major.
Such hard-earned independence never sounded as good as it does on Find My Way Home.
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