Kelly McFarling saw a banjo in the window of a pawn shop every day on her way to work. Her attraction to it was hard to explain.
“I thought, ‘I should just get [the banjo] and see,’” McFarling told Brooke Baldwin when she was featured on CNN’s Music Monday.
McFarling’s infectious mix of banjo styles – traditional combined with clawhammer – comfortably carries her earthy vocals centered around looking back. “The past is a haunting thing,” she says. “It’s always an important part of anything I do with my life and the way I write songs.”
McFarling has lived in San Francisco for four years, but her heart still belongs to her native Atlanta. The opening track on McFarling’s debut Distractible Child is a mash-up of vignettes taken from relatable childhood memories, like “skipping stones in the sewer pipes.”
In addition to McFarling and her band The Home Team, longtime local favorite Sparrows Gate play Henry Miller Library Friday. (McFarling and Vincent Randazzo add a show at Monterey’s Pierce Ranch Oct. 10.) Originally known for a big alt-country sound, Sparrow’s Gate has changed it up lately, leaning toward more mellow, soothing and minimal.
Lead singer/guitarist Zeb Zaitz describes it as “[music] you’d listen to early in the morning or late at night.”
There’s also more piano and less guitar than any of their previous material.
“The songs aren’t straight rock and roll,” Zaitz says. “They’re more dreamy.”
Opener Kendra McKinley, a big Santa Cruz draw, headlined the Kuumbwa Jazz Center eight months after her live debut at the Crepe Place. The 24-year-old talent describes her music as a mixture of “psychedelic chamber pop, bossa nova and Tin Pan Alley.”
KELLY MCFARLING & THE HOME TEAM with SPARROWS GATE and KENDRA MCKINLEY 6pm Friday, Oct. 9. Henry Miller Library, 48603 Highway 1, Big Sur. $25. www.henrymiller.org
MCFARLING with VINCENT RANDAZZO 8pm Saturday, Oct. 10, Pierce Ranch Tasting Room, 499 Wave St., Monterey. $12. 372-8900, www.piercevineyards.com
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