Kendra Morris
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The world's premier psychedelic soul band, Monophonics, cordially invites you to attend the grand re-opening of the once thriving, once vibrant establishment, the legendary Sage Motel. A place where folks experience the highs and lows of human existence. A place where big dreams and broken hearts live, where people arrive without ever knowing how they got there. It's where individuals find themselves at a crossroads in life.
What started as a quaint motor lodge and a common pitstop for travelers and truckers in the 1940s morphed into a bohemian’s hang by the 1960s and 1970s. Artists, musicians, and vagabonds of all types would stop there as seedy ownership pumped obnoxious amounts of money into high end renovations, eventually attracting some of the most prominent acts of the era. But when the money ran out, The Sage Motel devolved into a place where you rent by the hour.
Sage Motel, Monophonics' fifth studio album since 2012, tells its story. Once again produced by brilliant bandleader Kelly Finnigan, the album captures a timeless sound that blends heavy soul with psych-rock. With their previous album, It’s Only Us, selling over 10,000 physical units and garnering over 20 million streams, Monophonics have built a reputation over the past decade as one of the most impactful bands in the country.
If these walls of the Sage Motel could talk, this is what they'd say. So join us as we examine where the stories are told and experiences unfold.....and sink into a soft pillow of soulful psychedelia.....down at the Sage Motel.
GA-20 released their debut album “Lonely Soul” Oct 18th 2019 on Karma Chief / Colemine Records. The album debuted at #2 on the Billboard blues charts. “Live: Vol. 1”, released the following year, debuted at #1 on the Billboard blues charts and brought the band’s live sound to a wider audience. Medium.com declared, “This is the kind of music that travels through time while taking from the era where it was born and turning it into something fresh. Dirty and raw…timeless and modern.” In June 2021 GA-20 announced the new album “GA-20 Does Hound Dog Taylor: Try It…You Might Like It!,” a 50th anniversary celebration of Hound Dog Taylor, to be released August 20 via Colemine Records in partnership with the legendary Alligator Records.
Stubbs has spent the past 13 years as guitarist for Blues legend Charlie Musselwhite. During that time he has also backed up and toured with such Blues giants as John Hammond, James Cotton, Junior Watson and James Harman. Stubbs also leads his own original instrumental psych-rock band, 'The Antiguas.’
Kendra Morris’s LP Nine Lives, due to be released on Karma Chief Records in early 2022, marks not only the culmination of the decade since the release of her first LP Banshee, but also a turning point in Kendra’s life professionally and personally. Nine Lives heralds the beginning of a new chapter; a new label, and an evolution to the next level of adulthood. Nine Lives is a collection of her original songs encapsulating moments from what could be nine lifetimes lived over a chronological time period, or nine lives lived simultaneously in parallel and convergent realities. Kendra, while very much a New Yorker and veteran of almost 2 decades on the NYC music scene, hails from Florida and aesthetically embodies the broader sense of American culture, bringing to her contemporary sound a myriad of influences found in music and cinema dating back to the mid 20th century.
Kendra, though she hates to fly, will never refrain from boarding a plane to get where she is going. Her music, however, conjures imagery evocative of endless road trips to weird and wonderful places. Concurrently a visual artist, filmmaker and animator, Kendra harnesses the feline nine lives metaphor again and again. In the context of the chapters of her musical trajectory alone, we see at least 9 lives. Discovering the joys of multi-tracking and harmonizing with herself on a karaoke machine in the closet of her childhood home, to playing in cover bands in Florida, moving to NYC with the band she was leading to perform her original music in 2004, dealing with the breakup of that band by creating music alone on an 8 track, once again in her closet, meeting longtime producer Jeremy Page and signing to Wax Poetics for the release of her 2012 debut LP Banshee, self-releasing her 2016 EP Babble and going on to collaborate with artists such as DJ Premier, 9th Wonder, MF Doom, Czarface, Ghostface Killah, Dennis Coffey, and David Sitek, to name a few.
Truthfully, the life of this multi-disciplinarian artist contains multitudes of units of time and story lines through which we can all relate to universal themes of love, loss and overcoming one's fears, and be inspired by Kendra never ceasing to heed her spiritual calling to continue creating music and art, no matter what.
With no plans of slowing down but a belief in only evolving, the question lies in what will be her next nine lives?