The year is 1996, and a Baltimore-based songwriter is about to vanish.
After a two year torrent of home-taped cassette releases and a modicum of cult acclaim, the kid with a voice described as “sloppy and achey” disappears from view.
Alternative Press had just called his work “A dose of genius.” City Paper said his 200-song catalog had more in common with Dylan than in contemporaries like Lou Barlow. Yet, just as the buzz began to build, he walked away. “I didn’t want to be compared to people,” he said. “I didn’t want to put that on them.”
More than 25 years after the release of his last collection of acoustic-driven modern folk songs, Kjelli Blaik has returned with an album of sharply penned numbers fleshed out with guitar, banjo, and mandolin. In a musical career that has been anything but a straight line, this reemergence of a sloppy and achey voice speaks to long wanderings and experience gathered.
Following an odyssey through noise and subgenres and too many aliases to remember, what survives is the voice, the stories, and the words.
Kjelli isn’t just returning to his bluegrass and folk roots — he’s arriving with a sharpened pen and the scars of a thousand poetic brawls.
His new songs range from a recasting of the classic bluegrass song “Jessie James” as an ode to the legendary late baseball manager Earl Weaver to a novelistic multigenerational tale of Blaik’s own immigrant family surviving WWII, Reagan’s America, and latter day 21st century heartache. They drift from absurdist John Prine-esque hymns about car parts in heaven to allegories of classic horror-movie monsters loose in the halls of power.
Each one is a short story in song. And the 10-track full length release — Returning to the Fork in the Road — will be issued digitally and on cassette towards the end of 2025.
Click here to follow on Bandcamp.
Who is Kjelli?
Kjelli Blaik is part troubadour, part folklorist, part hoaxster — and for the better part of the last thirty years, he’s been wandering the hinterlands of American music.
Click below to find out a bit more about a musician that The Wire called “kaleidoscopic.”
