Ken Pomeroy – Hallways
Horton Records – 2 November 2018
First things first, while Ken Pomeroy may share her name with a college basketball author and statistician, looking not unlike a young Tori Amos, this Ken is a singer/songwriter from Oklahoma. While she may only have just turned 16, she’s already opened for Wanda Jackson and Hallways, recorded on four-track cassette tape, is her second EP. She described the title as representing a path into where she’s at musically, which, basically, is spare folk Americana that draws on her love of Woody Guthrie, delivered in a mature beyond her years voice that’s been likened to Courtney Marie Andrews, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar and ukulele (which she started playing when she was nine), the tracks occasionally coloured with mandolin, piano and dialled down electric guitar.
It opens with the stripped naked plaintive broken love song plea ‘Be There’, a perfect showcase for the open emotion in her voice, moving to the fingerpicked, subtle mandolin-trilled ‘Deprived’ with its social issues undercurrent (“you have to survive in a world that’s deprived”). The theme of social issue extends to ‘Sidewalk Song’, a fingerpicked Guthrie-esque number about homelessness and the potential to pull yourself out of the pit that won her the inaugural Jimmy LaFave song writing contest in Oklahoma.
The slow waltzing ‘Three Wonderful Words’ with its brief piano notes and strings is, as you might surmise, another love song, about how it can bring light to the darkest times, shading into the pared back fingerpicked title track, her voice rising to an echoey ambience, conjuring thoughts of early Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Tim Hardin as she sings “a different direction I turn my head/Trying to look away from the demons that I’ve fed.”
‘River’ is a particularly hushed, intimately sung number, a wearied acoustic strum, mottled ukulele notes and harmonies from Jason Scott on lyrics concerning seeking inner calm and tranquillity (“maybe I can harmonize to the key which you breathe”), the set closing with some studio chatter leading into the autobiographical ‘Living The Dream’ about a folksinger’s life on the road and the community they share, the hummably melodic number ending with a sing and clap along by all involved on the album.
While next time it would be good to hear her varying the tone and tempo, as introspective old-soul Americana goes, these hallways lead to an open door on a very bright future.
Order via Bandcamp https://hortonrecords.bandcamp.com/album/ken-pomeroy-hallways-2