Kelly McFarling - Water Dog (2017)

Kelly McFarling is an Atlanta, GA born, San Francisco-based songwriter. Her work is reflective of transitions, the wilderness, and its navigation. Sometimes she plays banjo, other times acoustic guitar. Often, she plays a Telecaster fronting her band, The Home Team, featuring pedal steel (Tim Marcus), drums (Nick Cobbett), bass (Oscar Westesson), and various other Bay Area musicians.

During her ten years in San Francisco, McFarling has released five independent recordings: studio albums, Distractible Child (2010) and Ridgeline (2013), an EP of cover songs, Others (2013), and two live albums, Live at Pirate Ship Laguna (2009) and Live at Eddie’s Attic (2011). She has toured behind her own projects as well as performing with bands like Y La Bamba and Goodnight Texas, and is one-third of the all-female folk trio Glittersnatch with Megan Keely and Wolf Larsen. Over the years, McFarling has shared the stage with artists such as Shovels and Rope, Sean Hayes, Chris Pureka, Jolie Holland, and has made a home for herself in the San Francisco music community.

Water Dog, McFarling’s latest release, is her most intimate and folk-leaning record to date. She recorded the album in seasonal segments of 2016. The songs were first demoed with Allen Rothschild in his bedroom in Asheville, NC, where the creaks of his wood floor and the sounds of summer winding down made their way onto the recordings through open windows and live takes.The demos became the foundation of the record, and McFarling took them back to San Francisco, where Avi Vinocur of Goodnight Texas produced and engineered the majority of the record at his home in the Sunset District. “Recording at Avi’s house gave us the time to let the songs breathe and evolve.” McFarling said of the process. “It gave us space to make decisions at our own pace. I’ve never made a record like that, and it was a really special time. These songs were written in quiet spaces that were lived in. It made sense to record them in that way.”