Take a husband and wife old-time music duo, give them a sound to paint to, a touch of JOHNNY DOWD, and more than a little style. Now, take those two, put them in the Mojave Desert, and put a few mics in the room. What comes out is Together And Alone.

‘The Dust’ immediately resonates, bell-clear and crystalline despite its title, Susan Kearns’ upright bass already as integral to the sound as the weathered, careworn voice of Pat. Grains of BRETT DETAR are sifted through vocal cords just this side of brittle, a breath away from brimstone and heart-deep in belief. Crafted from simplicity, as is all of this album, ‘Bandito’ is nevertheless shimmering as the mirage mentioned in the lyric, and we get the feeling of sitting in the ethereal living room of Joshua Tree prophet GRAM PARSONS without a twinge of irony in the comparison.

After the smooth, wistful wander through nostalgia that is ‘The Old Days’ (one has to give credit for rhyming “Schwinn” with “get up and ride again”), far-West storytelling in the vein of Louis L’Amour set to music, Cormac McCarthy’s sense of frontier injustice set to right makes an appearance in ‘You Got No Claim To The Mine’. A slight MARTY ROBBINS swing bounces us along through ‘The Funny Thing About Keeping Moving’, the words “Once in motion one tends to continue on.” blowing with the literacy of the aforementioned, sprinkled with a bit of the wryness found in the works of Flannery O’Connor and the confessionalism of John Berryman.

‘That’s Not What I Thought It Would Be’ weds DYLAN harmonica ala Another Side Of or John Wesley Harding to indie pop as interpreted by BONNIE PRINCE BILLY, and, while I’d love to have seen ‘Love Will Win In The End’ switched in song order with ‘Killing The Blues’, I’m also thinking that soon I’ll come around. And I do, just in time for the rustic romance of closing duet ‘When The Nights Are Cold’.

Take THE KEARNS FAMILY’s Together And Alone. Put it on your record player, put it in your CD player, put it on whatever your chosen way to hear music may be. But mainly, put it on…then let the songs pour themselves through your ears and into your heart. Pat and Susan will thank you, and you’ll thank yourself.
Review By: Lord Randall

THE KEARNS FAMILY
Together And Alone
Independent