Blue Skies For Black Hearts

After the break up of his riotous garage band Big Jim, lead singer/songwriter and self-taught producer Pat Kearns left the roaring guitars, bloody fingers and drug hazed nights behind and holed up in his own Studio 13 to record what would become the critically lauded debut album This Black Heart Is Gonna Break, a work lush with warm, layered guitars and keyboards, peppered with delicate yet brooding pop melodies.

He then set about putting together Blue Skies For Black Hearts to interpret the new sound. The band, featuring Portland music veterans Kelly Simmons of Man Of The Year and Michael Lewis of The Very Foundation, quickly put together a new album, Turn The Light Out, embracing the gritty, pulsating sound that live show fans were begging for. Everything was looking up for the band as it played packed out houses at festivals such as MusicFestNW and PdxPopNow! However, just as the band was ready to release their sophmore effort, everything fell apart.

While Lewis was off on tour, and Simmons away on vacation, Kearns' personal relationships with both his drummer and longtime girlfriend quickly disintegrated into an ugly miasma. Kearns' world was turned upside down, and the future of the band looked shaky at best.

Yet out of that chaos would come what is undeniably the best sogwriting work of Pat Kearns' life. The hurt and confusion fueled his creativity. While out at a show, Kearns' good friend and Nice Boys frontman Terry Six would, in a seminal moment, turn to the rest of his band and tell them that they would be heading up to Studio 13 the very next day to begin working on a new album for Blue Skies For Black Hearts. They tracked six songs in three days.

Lewis and Simmons returned a few weeks later and found a new album well underway. Kearns hadn't wasted any time, delivering material filled with emotional immediacy and catharsis. He gathered a host of premium players, and quickly finished Love Is Not Enough. It is dark, sorrowful, and at times even angry... yet does not succumb to despair, but rather hints and whispers at an impending sense of hope. Take the chorus of "The More You Say You Know." "The thought control has lost its hold and now I can remember my dreams." It is truly an album for black hearts, without losing the promise of blue skies to come.