Community Corner
San Francisco Irish Roots Original Singer-Songwriter Kyle Alden Performs Californiana Crafted Tunes
Kyle Alden is a San Francisco based
singer/songwriter/guitarist best known for his award winning folk music
settings of W.B. Yeats' poetry. With roots in the San Francisco Irish
music community,
Kyle has played guitar accompaniment for top Irish musicians (including
Randal Bays, Athena Tergis, Todd Denman, Tommy Peoples, Gearoid
O'hAllmhurain and Paddy Keenan) in concerts, dances and sessions,
performing on stages from Palm Springs to Redding, from Berkeley to
Honolulu.
Kyle Alden's new CD, "Down In The West, Vol. I", is a collection of
songs evoking the west coasts of the U.S. and of Ireland through a
series of loosely connected but interlocking
stories--a lone fisherman's twilight chance meeting and a boat plying
the waters of the Alaska gold rush, among others. Rendered in the
appealing acoustic/Americana style
of "Songs From Yeats' Bee-Loud Glade", Kyle's highly praised 2011 CD,
"Down In The West" features songs based on poems by W.B. Yeats, Robert
Burns and William Blake, plus two originals and
two covers (by Richard Thompson and Fred Neil).
Kyle has been writing and performing original songs since the early
eighties. "You could call his music Americana, though
Californiana might be a more accurate label," says Australian journalist
Bob Johnstone. "Kyle has long since absorbed and assimilated his
sources, and given them his own, distinctive twist". These are
"well-crafted songs, with catchy tunes, sung in a gentle, plaintive
voice" that evokes Canadian songsters such as Ron Sexsmith and Neil
Young.
Active in traditional-based acoustic music, Kyle plays with
Irish/Americana combo The Mild Colonial Boys (Rory McNamara, vocals and
guitar; John Caulfield, vocals, fiddle and mandolin), and traditional
Irish band The Gas Men.For this show, Kyle will be joined by Robert Powell on guitars, pedal steel guitar, and vocals; and Paul Eastburn on bass.