His voice is deep and soothing and steady. His melodies are hypnotic and winding, yet determined. They bring to mind a river, like the one in Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan:

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran
Then reached the caverns measureless to man

With his CD And So You Go, singer and songwriter J Kendel dips into the river that feeds his spirit and gives to others to drink. The songs reflect the soul of a man who has loved, lost, and discovered that he can find his way back to the place where he can love again. "Eventually, you come around to where you're ready to embrace the risk-taking part of love again, and you realize it's all a part of living -- and it's better than not having ever loved."

Kendel was born and raised on the windy western Oklahoma prairie, where he was drawn to the piano at a young age. "When I was five, I suddenly discovered the piano. Pianos seemed to be everywhere! And I would gravitate to them and pick out melodies, playing by ear." He remembers being thrilled to see a beautiful mahogany and rosewood piano glide through his front door one day - his parents had given him his heart's desire. "The deal was, I got to have this beautiful piano, but I had to take lessons. That was exactly what I wanted!" As he learned musical notation, he began to write down the melodies that would come to him. His first audiences were his family and a neighbor, Gwendolyn Jones, who later became an opera singer in New York and San Francisco. "She used to baby sit me, and I would take her songs I had written for her to sing."

The melodies kept coming, even through stints as a TV news reporter and anchorman, on-air talent coach, and executive producer of a national television show. "Sometimes I still have to pull the car over and write down the lyrics to a song that's coming to me. The music has never left me alone. It seems to just keep coming, regardless of where I choose to consciously focus my attentions."

A believer in the "we're just antennas picking up musical frequencies" theory of songwriting, Kendel says his goal is to share with others the words and melodies he hears in his head. "It never quite comes through as clearly as you hear it out in the ethers, but you do your best to get it translated through the medium you have to work with - which is you."

Ten of the songs he's heard over the years made it onto this CD, co-produced by Johnny Marshall of Marshall Sound Design in Dallas, Texas. Guitarists Andy Timmons and Jamey Perrenot, bassist John Adams, drummer Sean McCurley, sax player Ron Jones, keyboardist Brian Piper and other talented musicans helped Kendel burnish the tracks. Portraits of the many faces of love, the songs meander through deeply intimate relationships, chronicling their joys and sometimes bitter disappointments. The words are those of a veteran of love - he's scarred, but still standing.

For love will follow you no matter where you roam
As far as you can travel, there's no distance soul to soul...
The roads we travel will lead us with the dawn
We gave each other comfort and the strength to carry on
-- Soul to Soul

The trembling of your hand
The sigh just like your mother
The crumbling castles in the sand
Will there wash ashore another
-- Love Is Impossible (to Blame)

Warm lips that wish me awake
You're up making the morning
Breaking an egg for my breakfast
Mi cameré, Mi Camerica
--Mi Camerica

Like a river over time, the songs carve gentle grooves in the mind, lyric fragments and riffs surfacing and repeating, then diving again. J Kendel reminds us of the secret twists and turns, the dark caverns and the joyous fountains we find when we love deeply. "The truth about love is that it transcends space and time. True love will be right there with you - through it all." And so you go...




-- by Michaela Carolyn Griffin