Kai Killion always gets a little weirded out when someone puts on his band’s album from last year, Mermaid Legs & Getaway Dogs. It makes the singer and guitarist for Getaway Dogs hear his own music in an entirely different way.
“It’s funny when I hear the album in the outside world, and not just in my headphones,” he says with a laugh. “When I hear it randomly, or one of my friends tosses it in and chuckles because I’m right there … I feel a bit surprised by the lyrics sometimes, and maybe how dark some of them are.”
There are some dark moments on the record for sure, but listening to it is a beautifully random experience. Recorded at Gadgetbox Studios, Dogs is chock full of gorgeous, elegiac-sounding tunes whose subject matter runs from the personal (“Sleep”) to the otherworldly (“Mr. Skeleton”). A heavy Brazilian influence is found throughout—Killion’s mother emigrated from Brazil—and the record goes wherever it pleases rather than where you expect it to. It certainly keeps you on your toes.
“There are some autobiographical sections on the album, since I was going through a little bit of depression, an underlying sadness, in the year before I recorded it,” Killion says. “But there are also parts that are very abstract. I was inspired by artists like Tom Waits, Modest Mouse and Nirvana, lyrically.”
And yet, this is not a gloomy record.
“A few of them came out more positively than they had originally been written, which I’m glad about because it was such a positive experience,” says Killion. “There was almost no stress involved in the recording process. It was such a fun, exciting time.”
INFO: 9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3. The Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $8. 429-6994
