“The Essence of Homemade;” Small Town Band Kendall Row from Keene Prepare for Sophomore Album
(L to R) Gavin Key, Matt Keller, Jack Howard, Alex Rodier, and Sam Howard make up Kendall Row
“It all started in this room right here about three years ago. August 2018,” said Sam Howard.
On a side street in Keene, New Hampshire, in a small back room of Howard’s childhood home, comes the authentic, genre-blending sound of local band Kendall Row. Local musicians and longtime friends Gavin Key, Matt Keller, Sam Howard, Alex Rodier, and Jack Howard collaborate in performances beloved within the Cheshire County community.
“It’s not perfect, but in a good way,” said Key on the couch in Sam’s bedroom, their home studio down the hall.
The group began as a Grateful Dead cover band, lead by Gavin and Sam. As the two learned more from one another, they decided they wanted to start playing this music in a band, and thus, Kendall Row was born.
“The way I like to think of it is, for years he was trying to get me into the Grateful Dead, and I just didn’t care at all,” said Key, “at the start of it I played guitar but I wasn’t into the Dead, he grew up with the Dead but didn’t play guitar, so we kind of swapped places.”
After playing more and more together and writing two songs, they decided to begin working on their self-titled debut album.
“I’d say the concept for the first album was ‘let’s make an album,” said Key, “We admittedly should have waited a year before we did our first album but we did it a few months into being a band.”
The band’s first album, eponymously titled Kendall Row, featured songs such as Day by Day and Tastes Like Wine. These two songs in particular were similar to one another in the soft and mellow nature of the melodies, which intermingled with the rich grooves throughout the album. Though the contents of each individual song were phenomenal and intriguing, the pieces paired together didn’t exactly flow in a cohesive manner, making it difficult to find a common theme or direction of the album.
While Key and Howard recognized that the overall product of the debut could have been better than it was, Howard felt as though the album meant more to them than a polished piece.
“It may be a rush but it's more just about not taking no for an answer,” said Howard, “we could have waited and had it all done nice but we could also have waited five years and have it all done and splitting hairs at that point.”
The album, self-recorded and produced, released on Spotify in 2019.
Following the release, the band started finding their own place in the music scene, performing at the Keene Music Festival and local venues, all the while slowly transitioning to playing their own music intermixed with Dead covers.
“Every crowd we’ve performed to, more or less, we had our family or friends there,” said Howard, “It was mostly people that we know and love so it was super supportive. It was tight.”
Now experimenting with their own sound, the band is set to release their second studio album on April 9th. The album, titled Home Sweet Home, has a concept, though not on purpose.
Compared to their previous album, Home Sweet Home featured practically no collaboration when writing the tracks since Howard was on a trip to Colorado, Key had just begun college, and Keller was in his senior year of high school. The three wrote independently, yet they somehow created an album.
“[The songs] all ended up being more cohesive than the first album somehow,” said Key.
Writing an entire album separate from one another and finding a perfect fit to create an album speaks to the true connectedness of this band.
“We’ve all sort of gone our ways. but we come back together when we can at home sweet home,” said Howard.