Good Company by Kalyn Fay

There are plenty of songs about rambling on, platitudes about the romance of travel, of transient experiences in faraway places as a means of self-discovery. But what if you find your place---a soil where your roots dig deep and intertwine with the lives and art and thoughts of others---and then you find yourself leaving anyway?

Kalyn Fay’s “Good Company” is an exploration on the immutability of home. It’s a reverent portrait of the prairie and the people in it, what she calls a “love letter to the place I have known best,” made all the more poignant by the songwriter’s recent departure to Arkansas for a graduate fine arts degree.

“My ties to Oklahoma and Tulsa are extremely strong,” she says. “Sometimes I feel unable to separate how I describe myself and my music from the land. I wouldn’t be writing the music I write had it not been for a foundation in Tulsa.”

For the recording, she tapped into Tulsa, Oklahoma’s deep well of musical talent, including multi-instrumentalist and producer Jesse Aycock (Hard Working Americans, Secret Sisters) John Fullbright (Grammy nominee, Turnpike Troubadours), Paddy Ryan (Secret Sisters, John Moreland), an dso many more. Kalyn Fay’s startlingly rich voice is front and center throughout, a bold whisper blanketing the delicate, thoughtful instrumentation spearheaded by Aycock.

She sounds weary but ready, at once determined and resigned. “Will you miss me when I’m gone?” she sings on “Wait for Me,” and you can hear her looking into the distance as she asks.

“Good Company” patiently guides listeners through lamentations on ex-lovers, identity, redemption. It’s a solemn goodbye to a version of herself she’s not quite ready to abandon, a fond recollection marked by a still-tender pain.

“We’re all just looking for something / something to love, something to leave,” she sings on the title track. There’s a faint choir singing along. They’re important, lifting up her melody, but just quiet enough to seem far behind her.

kalynfay.com
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