Craig Kinsey

The bacchanalian frenzy of a Sideshow Tramps show will not prepare you for front man Craig Kinsey's solo album, The Burdener. While the Tramps peddle a party that borders on danger and darkness, Kinsey brings the devil to the forefront on a collection of songs that owes much to Bob Dylan.

"The songs that I write for the Tramps are designed to hit you immediately," Kinsey says. "They're designed to move the crowd into an ecstatic feeling.

"I wrote these songs to be the kind of thing that you hear once and think, 'Oh, that's kind of a nice song,' and maybe on the third listen it hits you in a way that you didn't notice before. When I first heard Love and Theft by Bob Dylan, I was like, 'This is crap.' But now I've been playing it over and over, and it hit me deeply. It's the acquired taste thing. Sushi somehow becomes better than Twinkies — not that the Tramps are Twinkies, those are really good songs."

Kinsey, whose hands never stray far from his neatly piled books of Nietzsche, rattles through his list of influences, from old country to old folk, Kentucky music and bluegrass, Bill Monroe, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Tom Waits. Like these masters of American music, Kinsey has made an unpretentious, bald-faced album that puts everything on the table: loneliness, sadness, loss, desire, regret. The burden of life.

"The songs came out of a burden. It's like novel writing. You have to have conflict for the story to begin. That's why there's a chess set on the album cover. Chess is a representation of life, combat and struggle. The person who created the game created it so that it burdens you. If there's no conflict, then it's really boring, and you might as well push pennies around a table."

If this is all starting to sound a little too heavy, it should be noted that The Burdener is not a dirge. The album opens with Deep Vermillion Rug's bawdy brass, drunken rhythm and sing-along lyrics that transport the listener to the Bohemian world that exists in hundreds of crumbling Montrose apartments happily inhabited by Houston's young artists. Big Ol' Tree is a "musical joke" that starts as simple folk song that builds to an epic song about very little. Kinsey calls it "ridiculous," which is to say that it's a lot of fun. Montrose Blvd. Blues is the happiest little tune about Houston you'll ever hear, reflecting Kinsey's deep love of his city.

"It's amazing to be an artist in Houston. It's a secret that I'm guessing won't be a secret for long. The focus is so much on the music and not on personalities."

Then there's the sad stuff that hits you like a ton of bricks. Waiting on a Train and St. Anne's Door are songs that take time, start quietly with plaintive statements and build to sing-alongs; from one lonely man to a chorus of support.

Though the record is a stunner, among the best discs to emerge from the Houston scene this year, Kinsey says he never intended for these songs to be recorded.

"I wrote those songs because they hit me, and I had to write them. The guy who produced the album, Mike Whitebread, convinced me that we had to record these songs and said he would pay for it. So I said, 'All right, if you're going to pay for it.' I pictured him having a little recorder, but I didn't envision this."

That chorus of people around Kinsey encouraging his artistry brings life to the songs on The Burdener. Twenty musicians helped Kinsey record this album in one day — Oct. 22, 2007. Familiar names like Hilary Sloan, Nick Gaitan, Chase Hamblin, Patrick Wheeler and Two Star Symphony show up in the liner notes.

"The feeling in the room was such that people called in sick to work, skipped school. Most of the songs are first takes. I didn't allow any kind of fixing, like if I messed up a word. I wanted to keep that stuff in there."

Now that the album is out, the issue at the forefront is the burden of marketing one's art.

"I have to take some responsibility. Enroll the kid in school, you know. It's on (Whitebread's record label) Trose Music; he's doing a lot to promote it. But the Tramps, all of us are really bad about that kind of thing. There are high school bands who are promoting better than we are. It's something I'm trying to work on because I'm happy with the album, especially when people tell me that they haven't taken it out of their CD player in a week. I know what that feels like with other people's albums and to think that I've given that, you know, it's good."

-- Sara Cress | June 19, 2008
- 29-95.com