Pendleton musician James Dean Kindle
Courtesy Lee Gavin
Singer-songwriter James Dean Kindle was born and raised in Pendleton. He’s been making music for decades and says he likes to blur the boundaries between country, folk, jazz, and Latin genres. He may be best known for his work with the Eastern Oregon Playboys, but he’s about to release his first solo album, and his first in six years. “Trailmix” was inspired by his time hiking in the Umatilla River Canyon.
He’s also immersed in music on an entirely different level as well, as the executive director for the Oregon East Symphony, a nearly 40-year-old institution that he’s helped grow over the last 10 years. Kindle joins us for an in-studio performance and interview. The official album release of “Trailmix” will be held in Pendleton on Saturday, April 6.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. James Dean Kindle joins us today, guitar in hand, harmonica on neck. Kindle bounced around Portland, Eugene and the tri-cities in his early adulthood. But a decade ago, he returned to his roots and settled in Pendleton where he grew up. In the years since then, Kindle has been a genre-hopping musician. He put out four albums of country-Inflected indie rock with the Eastern Oregon Playboys and played with the Swäwm Pass, which billed itself as one of the top improvisational electro funk bands in Northeast Oregon. If that were not enough, he has also had a classical music day job. He is the executive director of the Oregon East Symphony. Next month, James Dean Kindle is going to be releasing a new solo album called, “Trailmix,” made up largely of cowboy adjacent love songs. He joins us now for a preview. It’s great to have you on the show.
James Dean Kindle: Great to be here, Dave.
Miller: Can we start right in with a song from your new album? This is the first track. It’s called, “Meet Me At the Edge of Town.”
Kindle: I would love to play.
[”Meet Me at the Edge of Town” by James Dean Kindle playing]
Flyin’ ‘cross a vast expanse
A barren wasteland devoid of romance
But my heart found you calling out
To me amongst the blight
Would you meet me at the edge of town tonight?
They whisper behind windowpanes
It’s just a fantasy we entertain
But what do they know about love growing against dying light
Would you meet me at the edge of town tonight
Desert evening air is cold
It froze my bones and soul
My tender beating heart was pressed
Into a lump of coal
Throw me in your campfire
Until I start to smolder
Let the wind carry my smoke
Beyond the plateau
Twilight swiftly closing in
Where you and I end, where we both begin
The wilderness is calling us to steal ‘way from their sight
Meet me at the edge of town
Meet me at the edge of town
Meet me at the edge of town tonight
Miller: “Meet me at the Edge of Town” by James Dean Kindle is from the album that’s going to be coming out in just a few weeks. I read that at least some of these songs were inspired just from you hiking around in the Umatilla River Valley. How much did the landscape of where you live affect the songs on this new album?
Kindle: I think, in some ways, these are love songs about the landscape of Northeastern Oregon. When I was writing these songs, I was trying to think about how to use the landscape around me as kind of a metaphor for love and all of its different dimensions. And of course, a lot of it happened while I was hiking through the Umatilla River Canyon. It’s a place I’ve gone to ever since I was a kid, either camping with my family or Boy Scout trips or going to Outdoor School. So it’s probably the wilderness that I’m most intimate with, as it were. And I certainly spent a lot of time hiking through that canyon during the pandemic. There was not a lot to do. So at the outset of it, I spend a lot of time hiking up the canyon and it’s just a good time to clear your head and have melodies come to you.
Miller: So you’ll walk around and melodies will just come into your head?
Kindle: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just like, in some ways, I kind of have a little bit of sensory deprivation of some sort being out there in the wilderness. And I don’t know if you know there’s a local artist, you might be familiar with him, James Lavadour.
Miller: A very well-known Oregon painter.
Kindle: Yeah. And I kind of adopted some of Jim’s philosophy about how the landscape affects his painting. He talks about how when you’re integrated with the land, when you’re eating food that comes from the land, or in his case, first foods…or, say if you’re even just like walking, the vibration of each step that you take from that ground vibrating up through your body. For him, that ultimately ends up moving the paint across the canvas. And for me, that vibration ends up vibrating through my vocal chords and affects how melodies vibrate within my brain.
Miller: What about the musical influences themselves? Did you listen to country music or western swing when you were 15-years old?
Kindle: I did. I must confess I was much more into alt rock at the time. But it was something I grew up with. My mom’s side of the family, they’re all okies that moved over in the 1950s to the Northwest. And so a lot of them have this tradition of fiddle music. My grandfather was the president of the Washington Old Time Fiddlers’ Association. My grandmother, one of her biggest thrills in life was the fact that she got to dance with Tommy Duncan from Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys at the Grange Hall dance back in Oklahoma.
Miller: But you were interested in Nirvana?
Kindle: Oh, yeah, of course.
Miller: So when did you actually start to really care about this music? I mean, you have to care about it now to make it your own. Was there a time when you said I actually wanted to make this music myself?
Kindle: Yeah, it’s always been there. Certainly, if you listen to music with the Eastern Oregon Playboys, obviously, the name is an homage to western swing bands even though what we did was hardly western swing.
Miller: But there’s definitely a western influence in it.
Kindle: Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, there’s little bits and pieces of it in there and all those albums and even kind of these little independently-released CD/R albums that I released throughout the aughts. It’s always been in my musical DNA.
Miller: Can we hear another song, “Death & The Cowboy”?
Kindle: Sure.
Miller: What should we know about this before we hear it?
Kindle: Well, I guess this is maybe the one non-love song on the album. Although there might be an argument to make that there is love in death. But yeah, this one is a fun song. This is actually kind of a rewrite of sorts of the old English folk ballad, “Death and The Lady” where, in that folk ballad, this noble woman is out one day and meets death, personified and is informed that her time will soon come to pass away. And then she tries to use all of her material wealth to pay him off but, alas, that will not hold off death. So, I decided it would be fun to write that in a country western idiom. So, hence “Death & The Cowboy.”
[”Death & The Cowboy” by James Dean Kindle playing]
Miller: That’s “Death & The Cowboy” by my guest James Dean Kindle. It is one of the songs in his new album that’s coming out in just a couple of weeks. Why did you move back to Pendleton after a while away in Eugene and the tri-cities, as I mentioned in a number of years in Portland?
Kindle: Well, I always had one foot back in Pendleton, if anything because I had a rock and roll band that was based there. And we had, I suppose, a long distance band relationship. But about 10 years ago, I was working for a vaunted Portland institution, Radio Cab. A great job at the time for a musician.
Miller. And you were not the only musician to work there.
Kindle: Yeah, it was very, very good company there. But I was certainly about three years into that, I was getting pretty burnt out and looking for a good reason to bring me back to Pendleton. And lo and behold, a position opened up with the Oregon East Symphony to be the operations manager, which was essentially the assistant executive director position. And I had some nonprofit experience before. I’d served on some boards and had a little bit of grant development experience for another nonprofit in Pendleton and people on the board knew me. They were comfortable with me and thought they’d give me a shot.
So that brought me back and then it became pretty apparent not long after I was there that I was being groomed to be the new executive director. And that happened much sooner than anybody anticipated because my predecessor had a family emergency that caused her to retire early. But everybody felt comfortable with me in that position. And the nonprofit is still standing and we’ve grown. So I think I’m doing a good job.
Miller: Do you still think of yourself as a punk kid? You’re somebody who you were in the underground scene. As a teenager, you and your friends would create venues to have shows, right? Do you still feel like you have that sensibility even as you’re running a classical music nonprofit?
Kindle: 100%. I feel that the work I’m doing with the Oregon East Symphony is really just the same kind of work we did as teenagers putting on these shows in a garage, galvanizing what resources we have in our community to make this communal event. It’s just on a bigger scale and probably a lot of grant and corporate sponsorship dollars involved, too. Yeah, same thing.
Miller: After putting out a bunch of albums with your old band, a long-term artistic partnership, what was it like to get back in the studio in recent years, to deal with other musicians? There’s a band on this new album but it’s not the same band, and you’re more on your own. What was that like?
Kindle: A little bit of an adjustment because I had the Eastern Oregon Playboys, who are now on a kind of an indefinite hiatus at this point. We’ve been together for 15-plus years and that was my primary artistic vehicle, and we knew how to read each other. So kind of developing that new, I suppose, telepathic connection with a different set of musicians, there’s always a bit of a learning curve.
But I’m pretty happy with the musicians that play on this album. My pedal steel guitar player, Roger Conley, is a very experienced musician. In fact, pedal steel is not his first instrument. And he’s a fountain of knowledge. And he’s been, in some ways, I feel like a lot of the songs on the record are really kind of duets between my voice and his instrument. And similar with…actually the bass player on the record, Aaron Engum, he and I go back quite a long ways. He played a double bass and some proto versions of the Eastern Oregon Playboys. But he’s got more of a jazz background. So, yeah, it’s kind of an interesting touch that he lends to the ensemble as well.
Miller: Can we hear one more song? Can we hear “Rabbit Trail” Which I hear is like a kind of a wistful waltz?
Kindle: Yeah, a little wistful cowboy waltz, just kind of not holding on too tight to your lover and just kind of letting them, I guess…yeah, roam free across the landscape.
[”Rabbit Trail” by James Dean Kindle playing]
Miller: James Dean Kindle, it was great having you here. Thanks so much for coming in.
Kindle: Thank you for having me, Dave.
Miller: Do you mind playing us out with some music while I do some show business here?
Kindle: I’d love to.
Miller: James Dean Kindle is a Pendleton-based musician of basically every flavor you can imagine. He’s also the executive director of the Oregon East Symphony. The official album release of “Trailmix,” his new album, is going to be in Pendleton on Saturday.
[Guitar and harmonica music paying]
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