Recent News
November 2025 — Elkridge. Back home after a trip to Chicago. New album was released 07 November on Bandcamp and on the evil streaming services. Started work on a new book — something that partially harkens back to The Violencestring (2007). Looking to get that finished up and out the door by the end of the year.
Newly Available
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 — check out this here bio for the whole story.
Click below to find out a bit more about why The Wire called his work “kaleidoscopic.”
