One to watch: Kenny Foster

Kenny Foster had a busy year last year as he released his second album and went out on tour, including some festival appearances here in the UK. He is a hard-working, energetic musician who is a joy to watch and listen to. I was excited to catch up with him to delve deeper into this latest project. 

Can you tell me a little bit about who you’ve been working with on the album? 

I worked with Mitch Dane. He was an engineer/producer with one of my very favourite bands growing up, called Jars of Clay. They were just a really interesting group of guys that really cared about saying things. I loved that, sonically, they just kept evolving over and over again. Mitch has all this vintage gear, and he has this lovely studio called Sputnik sounds and I just kept going back there. I brought in all of my favourite songwriters. There’s two guys that are all over this record, Chris Rafetto and Brendan Cooney and the three of us have just really found this triad of mutual respect and kind of filling each other’s gaps of songwriting prowess. Sierra Hall is this amazing writer, artist and mandolin player and I had her come and play, she was a delight to have along with my friend, Josh Smith, who played dobro and there’s a really beautiful moment on the record, where the two of them interchange solos and then play on top of each other and it’s my favourite part. I also wrote with a Hall of Famer, Marcus Hummon on a track and Kirsti Manna who’s famous for Blake Shelton’s ‘Austin’. It was just a very easy, very organic way of putting together a record that I think encapsulates something that I’ve wanted to say for a long time.  

Can you tell me the story behind ‘Dreams Change’? 

I think that was a day where Brendan came in with an idea. Brendan is from Massachusetts. Chris is from North Carolina and I’m from Missouri, which are all very different places. So it’s interesting that the three of us were very music loving suburban kids. Where country music has been sitting for the past 10 years or so, is very, like, southern bonfire tailgate and that was none of our experience. We had wonderful midwestern American upbringings but it’s very far from southern country. Brendan had the line, ‘Dreams change and people do too.’ Many of us have these ideas growing up, we’re trying on different suits of what we might become. I think we need to remove the stigma from people who are chasing a dream and remove the stigma from those whose dream was very simple.  

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW IN THE LATEST ISSUE OF MAVERICK AVAILABLE HERE!
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