Musicians come from a variety of backgrounds. Some come from an academic background, which doesn’t hurt as education is always applicable.
Singer-songwriter Kim Jennings has a BA in psychology in Harvard. Jennings was also a French major for one year. She actually started out at Harvard as a physics major and going to be a physics teacher. She worked in Human Services for five years and she got a Master’s Degree in counseling. She also has a math brain, and at one point she went back to school for technology and learned data base design and she has been working in I.T. ever since.
It would make one curious to know how she went from an Ivy League education to being a singer-songwriter. “I’ve always loved music, ever since I was a kid,” Jennings said. “I sang a lot growing up and taught myself to play piano when I was in middle school. I was always very active in music as well as sports and academically. I was one of those kids who likes to do everything.”
Boy, were her parents surprised when she told them she was going to study music when she was preparing for her S.A.T.s and applying for colleges. They told her she had to find something that would make for a career, something she could make a life out of it.
“They of course were looking out for my best interests. I guess I was a smart kid so they wanted me to make the most of that. I’m the oldest of eight kids.”
Music was still in the picture when she was at Harvard. She sang in the Harvard Radcliffe Chorus. She took a music theory class senior year and began writing. “It’s been in the back of mind for quite some time,” she said. “Only in the past three to fours years I got really into writing and writing my own songs and getting interested in playing out more and seeing what’s possible.”
Jennings believes her education in psychology and her experience in human services supports her songwriting in that it gave her a way to observe and connect with people. “That plays into who I am and how I view the world,” Jennings said.
Any kind of event or feeling could inspire her to write a song. “A lot of my inspiration comes from being in a community of songwriters and having sound people that support the process and the art and the imperfections of what it takes to create something new,” she said. “I often find myself inspired by my friends and other people who are making music. I have songs I have written from dreams. I have some very vivid dreams. I’ll wake up with an image in my head and I’ll think it’s a great kernel for a song story. My song ‘One More Time’ came from that. I had this vision of a guy and a girl in a kitchen in a white room sitting on the floor.”
She has another song called “Into The Night” that came to her while driving in Worcester going to work at six o’ clock on a Saturday morning. The different early morning look at the city made her think ‘Oh, there’s a song in there.”
Jennings doesn’t have a set method for songwriting. It comes to her in a different way each time. A busy person, she might only have five minutes to sit down at the piano or to pick up her guitar when a chord or an idea for a lyric or melody line pops into her head. “I kind of take what I can get,” she said.
The opening track on her full length CD My Own True North is called “One More Time.” It is about a couple breaking up. Yet, there is something more than just a break up going on.
“A lot of relationships end there’s a lot of feeling of glad to see you go and I can’t wait for this to be over. But I think there’s some where you know that it’s not working, and the story of this woman is she is little bit too dependent on someone. At the same time, he doesn’t see her for who she really is, and that’s why it’s not working. He can’t handle the truth.”
Jennings’s song “I’m Only Human” has a thick, fulsome sound with harmonica and an upright bass shadowing Jennings’s heavy strum. Her lyrics inspire that sound to be hefty. “My vision for my first album was to be fairly stripped down. There were a handful of songs that I felt could have a slightly bigger sound than that, and that was definitely one of them. And Andrew Green who played harmonica on that track is a good friend of mine, great harmonica player and an amazing songwriter in his own right. That was a no-brainer, jamming around with my friend and the next thing you know, ‘Oh, you have to play on this song. This will sound cool.’”
The feel of the song had to be bigger because it is a stand up and take notice, here I am. Multi-instrumentalist and engineer Seth Connelly contributed the upright bass performance. Jennings adored working with Connelly, and she knew he could pull together something for the upright. “It was pretty much exactly how I envisioned it,” she said.
Jennings’s song “Save Me” is a study in contrasts. Her voice blends beautifully with backing vocalist Mally Smith while Jennings’s piano playing is at once lovely but also very dark.
“What I love about a piano ballad is that there is beauty in the darkness,” the songwriter said. “To me, there’s something about the human experience that is so beautiful even in its pain. That’s one of the songs where I was having a really bad day. I put it into a song, and it kind of helped me make it through.”
“To me,” she continued, “the harmonies add a level of emotionality to it and lift it above the darkness. I love that about that particular song and Mal just did a beautiful job with the harmonies.”
Jennings’s tune “True North” speaks to her journey towards becoming a singer-songwriter from her career path launched at Harvard. She is embracing her true self, who she truly feels she is. “The song is as much a message to myself as it is to anyone who might not understand me.”
Sound engineer Seth Connelly got a great sound for Jennings’s CD. “Better than I could have ever ever imagined,” she said. “I had done some recording in college, which was great, but you get 14 women in a room and trying to get the right take, and it can become kind of stressful. But this being my first as a songwriter too. When I was asking around and finally getting ready to start, nine out of ten people were already doing a project with Seth. He’s such a gentle soul and he’s brilliant musically. He very intuitively put me at ease in a way that I didn’t’ know what possible.”
Jennings and her music associate Dan Cloutier from the greater-Worcester area formed and launched the Birch Beer Label to promote and support local singer-songwriters. For now, it’s her and Cloutier who are being represented already, and they are developing other talent and they have funded one artist’s CD and his tour. “That was a really cool thing to be able to do,” Jennings said. “It’s small and it’s growing.”