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For Immediate Release

30 September 2025

Kjelli Blaik’s New Album Marks a Homecoming 25 Years in the Making

From a modicum of lo-fi cult acclaim in the ’90s to a new collection of story-driven folk songs born from a year of bluegrass and recovery

After 25 years exploring the far edges of underground music, Maryland songwriter Kjelli Blaik returns to his acoustic roots with Returning to the Fork in the Road (out November 7, 2025).

Known in the 1990s as Shelly Blake — a lo-fi folk cult figure whose work was acclaimed by Alternative Press as “a dose of genius” — Blaik built his early sound on a mix of folk, blues, and bluegrass filtered through indie rock. Now, after decades of sonic detours through noise, improvisation, and experimental collaborations — including as a co-organizer of Baltimore’s High Zero and a member of the storied Red Room Collective — Blaik re-emerges with a set of story-driven songs that trace his journey home.

“The farther out I went,” he said, “The more things looked just as they did back home.”

Blaik’s early work culminated in the 1999 recording of the album Folk Blues and Things to Use which was likened at the time both to 60’s luminaries and 90’s iconoclasts. “I’d been a kid who grew up listening to bluegrass transmitting out of WAMU in DC. But I was also just a product of my time – listening to 60’s music while playing in latter day punk and hardcore and indie bands.”

His subsequent abandonment of acoustic and traditional songwriting led to a long strange journey into noise, improvisation, and extreme areas of dark and gothic music that The Wire called by turns “a thorough exploration of possible sound” and “kaleidoscopic”.

“No one would consider Baltimore’s experimental underground the natural landing place for an indie folk singer,” he said. And yet, that is how things turned out when Blaik joined the Red Room Collective in 2008. The resulting traversal into improvised theatrics, exploratory found sound, and the trials present at the edge of the research frontier of experimental music changed something in Blaik’s conceptual makeup while at the same time reinforcing some of his most deeply held idiomatic beliefs about music.

With this new recording — due out digitally and on cassette on 07 November 2025 — Blaik takes on these unrelenting beliefs and returns to his acoustic roots.

Artist: Kjelli Blaik

Album: Returning to the Fork in the Road

Genre: Folk, Bluegrass, Americana, Singer-songwriter

Format: Digital / Cassette

Label: Self-released

Release Date: 07 November 2025

Digital Downloads: kjelliblaik.bandcamp.com

“In many ways, this album is the result of taking stock of the past and dragging it into the present,” said Blaik. “But it’s also a matter of immediate circumstance. At the end of last year, I suffered an eye stroke that left me with significantly compromised vision. For over a year, I’d been attending a regular bluegrass session just to keep my chops up and to learn old songs. The session was led by Barb Diederich and her husband Tom Gray — he’d played bass in The Country Gentlemen and The Seldom Scene. And those jam sessions had been instrumental in making me reconsider the bluegrass and folk music of my younger days. But, following the stroke, I couldn’t drive my car anymore. And so, I was stuck at home with these old melodies going through my head. It was when I started writing lyrics against those melodies that the new album was born.”

Known for his sometimes biting and satirical but just as often elegiac and memory-driven lyrics (“He can seem to be offering up a diary page in song”, said City Paper), Blaik’s pen has only gotten sharper — and more eclectic — in the intervening years. The new batch of songs features a bluegrass stomper dedicated to Earl Weaver, the irascible and legendary manager of Blaik’s hometown Baltimore Orioles; a novelistic account of the lives of a Polish immigrant family stretching from the onset of World War I through Reagan’s America and on into 21st century heartache; a John Prine-esque plea for the availability of affordable aftermarket car parts in the afterlife; a self-deprecating bit of slowly evolving self-awareness regarding how a trans friend reacts to attempts to express understanding; a timely barnstormer about self-righteous and moralistic witch hunts; and a fantastical vision of the halls of power ruled and ransacked by classic horror movie monsters.

“My writing has become more intentional, more crafted, and maybe a bit less self-indulgent,” said Blaik, “I think three decades in the metaphorical wilderness, not to mention experiencing what happens when you are deprived of your senses, will do that to you.”

The ten-song album blends bluegrass rhythm with folk arpeggios, old-time banjo, and Blaik’s cracked, lived-in “sloppy and achey” voice. The result is part balladry, part elegy — storytelling music with scars.

“I’m hesitant to say the word ‘bluegrass’ because so many people these days immediately go to expectations of festival jamming and virtuosic playing — and this is anything but that,” said Blaik. “My touchpoints are more the songwriters like Ola Belle Reed or Hazel Dickens. I’ve always been more interested in storytelling as opposed to whatever pyrotechnics that can be applied to the breaks when songs are taken up on stage.”

The songs on the new album reflect three decades of life in the hinterlands of American underground music. “I spent a while — it turned out to be decades — working in the far extremities of where music can go. Spent a lot of time in free improvisation. A lot of time in noise and in the more avant regions of metal and heavy music. But I’ve gradually been coming back to acoustic music. And, maybe ironically, this new album sort of picks right up where I left off some 25 years ago. It’s like the album I would have made back then had I not taken a detour to a much different place. That’s the reason for the album’s title. There was a fork in the road. I’m going back to revisit it.”

Returning to the Fork in the Road is Blaik’s first acoustic-oriented album of contemporary folk songs since the release of Folk Blues and Things to Use 25 years ago — an album that at the time was reviewed as “overflowing with complex emotions, luminous lyricism and sad, stark beauty”.

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Kjelli Blaik is available for interviews, reviews, and features. Advance downloads and assets available upon request.

Contact: https://kjelliblaik.com/contact

Press Kit: https://kjelliblaik.com/presskit