Kela Parker - The Dreamer and the Dream (2018)

Earthy, raw, and evocative, the genre-bending sound of Kela Parker channels the roots of folk music, "but like folk music from a country you've never heard of before." Like her unusual chord progressions, the singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist followed a winding, serpentine path to arrive at her distinct sound. Growing up in a family of classical and folk players, as a young musician she gravitated equally to Joni Mitchell’s alternate guitar tunings as to the dramatic piano ballads of Rachmaninoff and Chopin.

Drawing from a well that reaches deep into the musical past and into her own emotional journey, her hidden harmonics and oral
narrations pulse with the dissonance of artistry amidst modern world industry. Pivoting between the ultimate individualism and the shared universal rhythm, Parker creates an accidental kind of jazz, one's personal improvisation of the world's collective folk step. She is equally rootsy and ethereal, spontaneous and composed.

The Dreamer & The Dream is a collection of 14 original songs written by Kela Parker from 2013-2016, and recorded between 2016-2017 in various studios, churches, and apartments where she traveled between in Portland, Oregon and Brooklyn, New York. It is a record about migration and disorientation to the city changing around you, with the increasingly volatile disruptions and shifts of the natural world's ecological balance as its backdrop. From within the tumult, a fresh harmony emerges, a new-fangled account of being an evolving self in a changing place. Speaking to and through the authentic human instrument, Kela Parker soundtracking rhythms of a post-genre new world.