Courtesy Ryan Koenig's "I Dreamed of Highways" / via YouTube/Nate Burrell
Ryan Koenig
Between them, Kellie Everett and Ryan Koenig are involved in roughly a dozen bands to one degree or another. In some cases, those projects are occasional, while others take up a central part of their lives, which they share as husband and wife. In coming weeks, both will be celebrating the release of live albums, a year and change after a car accident in South Carolina that left each injured. Koenig’s injuries were more physically severe, including head trauma and broken bones.
On Saturday, December 30 of last year, Koenig took the stage at The Focal Point, only 25 days after the incident in South Carolina, during which the two were walking to morning coffee when struck by a vehicle. After an initial hospitalization in South Carolina, where the pair had been on tour with Pokey LaFarge’s band, Koenig returned to St. Louis. He planned to honor a new arrangement at Maplewood’s long-running folk club, where he’d been offered a last-Saturday-of-the-year gig in perpetuity. The accident didn’t pause the plan, though Koenig admits “I barely remember that show.”
Everett notes that “there was barely a dry eye in the audience the whole time, which was really nice.”
The experience that night was reprised on February 7 of this year, though the audience only included a small handful of friends, as well as The Focal Point’s longtime recording engineer Eric Stein. The idea of recording and releasing Focal Point performances had taken on more interest in recent years and this night saw Koenig play several dozen songs, with recording stretching deep into the morning. The result is a 10-song disc called The Focal Point Recordings Vol. 1, a CD that finds him covering a variety of songwriting voices, from known (Margo Price, Jerry Jeff Walker, Kinky Friedman) to emerging (NOLA’s rising star Esther Rose).
“Generally, when I’m making records, it’s not about this thing that’ll get me famous or will make me a lot of money,” Koenig says. “It’s about documenting what I’ve been doing. This one’s more of a folk record. None of the songs are mine. Sometimes, I forget that because something’s one of my favorite songs, that doesn’t mean that anybody else has ever heard it. I definitely like to do something a little bit different every time and, hopefully, this will let people who know what The Focal Point is if they know me.” And, of course, vice versa.
Koenig says that “they record everything there, but don’t release anything without permission. They pretty much threw the idea out there, not just for a show, but for a recording session in the room. Eric Stein was like, ‘I think I can handle that.’ We went pretty late, that’s for sure, and I probably recorded three-times as much as what’s on the record. But some of this was done with the idea of ‘let’s see if this works.’ Michael [Holtz, The Focal Point’s booking director] says that I can have the last Saturday of the year there, and we should record sessions. Our show this year will be a record release and we’re essentially trying to make that a trend every year.”
While the recording’s going to be officially released with the upcoming December 29 show at The Focal Point, another important step in his recovery will come in January. This one will be more of a spiritual and emotional bit of recalibration, as Koenig will join some other St. Louis musicians on a longer, January trip to New Orleans, his home away from home. There, they’ll play with scene stalwarts like Rose, while allowing Koenig a chance to finally travel.
After about a decade of touring domestically and internationally with LaFarge (along with other, U.S. stints touring with the Rum Drum Ramblers and Jack Grelle, among others), Koenig’s out-of-town shows in 2018 have been modest, with day trips to places like Champaign, Illinois, or Marthasville.
“I’ve been realizing that I have friends in so many other places and I’m not used to going a whole year without seeing them,” he says. “There’re a lot of branches of the St. Louis musical family tree and the St. Louis/New Orleans exchange is definitely a thing.”
For Everett, a return to the road came sooner, though it was bittersweet. After helping Koenig with his initial convalescence in St. Louis, where surgeries and physical rehab were the norm throughout early 2018, she was back on the road with her own rock-and-roll band, the Columbia, Missouri–based Hooten Hallers. In 2019, she figures that the band (which she shares with guitarist John Randall and drummer Andy Rehm) will be on the road roughly 150 to 160 days, including a stint in the United Kingdom.
The band will be offering a new piece of merchandise as they travel, a recording called Live in Missouri, captured at Columbia’s famed Blue Note. The album came out in an interesting fashion, in that the band (known for raucous live shows) wanted to capture at least five video cuts, a jump up from fan videos shot on phones at shows. They wound up with those, but found a 12-song live album in the process.
“Columbia is the hometown of John and Andy and the official home of the band, so this made sense,” Everett says. “It’s a beautiful venue and we needed some live videos. It’s always good energy, when you play in front of people who you know are supportive, and John definitely feeds off of that. You can see that in the energy of our playing.”
And, of course, you can hear it. The Live in Missouri disc will be offered up to fans at two shows in December: at CoMo’s Rose Music Hall on Friday, December 21, and at Off Broadway in South City on Saturday, December 22. The album includes cuts that come from before Everett joined on baritone sax, so the album’s something of the band’s greatest hits release, with cuts from the group’s full history.
“We struggled to capture what we sound like live,” she says. “I’ve heard recordings before, but they didn’t do our live show justice. I think this will convince people that the live shows are fun, and people will be happy to take one home if they’re at the live show.”
When in town, Everett will continue to perform with groups such as the Arcadia Dance Orchestra, the Gaslight Squares, and others, seldom going a week without some type of planned or unplanned performance.
Both she and Koenig will, in the span of a few weeks, offer up new music after what could only be considered a turbulent year. Asked if the new year was something that offered a chance to reflect or refocus, Everett says that, for her, the Hooten Hallers do use the calendar year for some goal-setting and framing, but that for she and Koenig, “everything’s now based on ‘before or after the accident.’ It changed everything.”
And even through those challenging months, they created. And this month, fans get a chance to share their experiences in two very different, but complementary live albums.
