North Carolina singer/songwriter Kenny Shore will be releasing new album Time Stands Still on November 4th, 2022, embracing many “musical landscapes” along the way. You can expect elements of Bluegrass, Soul, Rock and Roll and themes dealing with “failures, loss, hopes, and loves”.
Shore’s joined on the album by a host of friends including Andrew Marlin (Watchhouse) on mandolin, Isaac Derr on bass and guitar, Joseph Terrell (Mipso) on guitar and lap steel, Jerry Brown, who Produced the album, on banjo, Robert Sledge on bass, Rob Ladd (the Connells) on drums, Joe MacPhail on piano and Hammond organ, Danny Abrams on baritone sax, Ron Poythress and Lizzie Rose on backing vocals.
Shore also pays tribute to his musical heroes on Time Stands Still. “Almost Like Heaven” recalls John Prine’s “Illegal Smile.”
As Shore recalls:
I cried the day John Prine died. I just started playing his albums and cried.. This is a true story of … let’s call it a “dream-like state” I experienced one night where I truly felt his presence in the room. He gave me the chorus verbatim.
Shore also tells his life story in song on the title track where he also name drops Kurt Vonnegut and Kierkegaard as he meditates on the nature of time.
Shore explains:
This song just poured out. I guess I was saying ‘what exactly is Time anyway?’ Many days I feel like my deceased loved ones never left me at all and Time is fluid.
During college, Shore formed a 1950s band and performed in local clubs. After college, Shore launched a solo career, releasing the single “Waiting for the Rain” and opening for the Folk singer Mike Cross. He put together a group called The Dayroom Monitors in the early 1980s in the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, music scene. Shore then stopped writing for about ten years, but by the end of the 1990s he was working on an album, which he released in 2001 under the title One Breath at a Time. Since then he’s been working on his own mixture of musical traditions which he calls “psychopop folkabilly.”
On this album, Shore originally planned to do an EP, but extra songwriting kept popping up which led to its expansion.
