Album "Lucky Penny"

Kendall Lujan: jazz, bossa nova, indie and yodeling

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Rola Music, Jax Cruz)

Portland-based Kendall Lujan has already performed live at the Blue Bird Festival and Haus der Musik in Vienna - now the top talent is releasing her eagerly awaited debut album "Lucky Penny" and is coming to Austria live again. She spoke to the "Krone" in advance about the album and the deliberately chosen boundlessness of her sound.

Away from the well-known American music metropolises such as Los Angeles, New York, Nashville and Detroit, the tranquil, progressive city of Portland in the north-west of the USA has long since emerged as a pearl of underground culture. For some time now, there has also been a cross-connection to Vienna. Dominik Schmidt, founder and owner of the Rola Music label, commutes back and forth between the USA and Austria every six months and uses his time in the "land of opportunity" to make interesting musical acts better known in our part of the world. A good example is singer Kendall Lujan, who performed her musical art at one of the many open mic nights in Portland when Schmidt was present and took a look at the versatile program.

No desire for categorization
The record deal was quickly signed and the first spurs earned. Lujan performed at the renowned Blue Bird Festival at Porgy & Bess in 2023, then appeared at the Haus der Musik in Vienna last fall and now has more dates in the rest of Austria planned for the beginning of spring. For the first time, she now has an album in her luggage - "Lucky Penny", her eagerly awaited debut, which she announced some time ago, but which was meticulously crafted and took even longer to finalize. Lujan primarily focuses on folkloristic singer/songwriter sounds, but rigid genre classifications are alien to her per se. For example, "Return To Sender" is a pure bossa nova track, "You Got Me" meanders in the direction of jazz and indie rock snippets can also be filtered out in places. What sounds like wild chaos in theory becomes a congruent overall concept when you listen to it.

"My favorite genre is actually jazz," Lujan reveals in the "Krone" interview, "I listen to a lot of Billie Holiday and Etta James and adore this music. But my singing is not suited to it. I have this kind of yodeling in my voice that is better suited to indie, country and folk music. So I've created my very own melange of sounds from my interest and my voice." Portland as a home base is a more than fertile location for breaking out of the usual molds. Just like the way of life itself, the musical realization there is seen as groundbreaking and as diverse as possible. "There's something on my album for everyone who appreciates the genres I'm talking about. Despite everything, the songs have a nice rounded arc and don't sound disjointed," says the artist, pleased with the result of her long and hard work.

Music in the cradle
Lujan has already proven herself on NPR's popular "Tiny Desk" in the USA and won the "John Lennon Songwriting Contest". Lujan prefers to write her songs in seclusion in rainy surroundings and with a little sadness in her heart. Songs like the opener "How Ya Doin'", the title track "Lucky Penny" or "I Want To Be In Love With You" are written from a personal intimacy and give a deeper insight into the musician's soul life. She was born with a love of music. "My mother still has videos of me singing to my Barbie dolls," she laughs, "my parents later forced me to take piano lessons, which I hated. I never practiced and my piano teacher even gave up because I was hopeless. I only discovered my love for it late in life, wrote my first songs about seven years ago and then started playing guitar."

This late passion seems to be slowly developing into a real profession. Lujan would not have expected this some time ago. By her own admission, she suffers from severe stage fright and still has to persuade herself to take the stage. But when she stands there and her timbre blends with the soft pastel tones, you can let yourself fall calmly into the soundscapes of this young US talent. Only rarely does Lujan deviate from the formula of writing very personally. For example in "Return To Sender". "When I was in New York, I found a postcard from 1910 and it was addressed to a woman called Else in Portland, Oregon. That was actually the address of my neighbor's house! It fascinated me so much that I had to write a song about it."

A coming and going
The content of "Weird Birthday Song" is also fictional. "It's about a fictional character called Ginger, who could of course be me because of my hair color. It's Ginger's birthday and she doesn't really want to celebrate, but all her friends throw her a party and make her do it. It's a metaphor for the fact that a lot of people often do things for others but secretly only do them for themselves. I also loved the idea of doing a new, completely crazy song on this theme alongside the classic birthday songs." Her best-known song, "Goodbyes", with which she closes "Lucky Penny", has already been tried out in various TV series. "You get to know so many people in life. Some appear briefly, others are there for longer, others stay forever. The subject fascinates me a lot, I just had to write something about it."

Live in Austria
With "Lucky Penny", Kendall Lujan has definitely come to stay. She will also be presenting her new work four times in Austria. On March 14, she will be playing at Chybulski in Feldkirch, on April 8 at Das Werk in Vienna, on April 11 at Röda in Steyr and on April 12 at Kino Ebensee.