CRESWELL – You know when you hold a seashell to your ear and it sounds like you’re hearing the ocean? You’re actually just hearing amplified background noise.
Singer-songwriter Brian Kelly calls his solo musical act “Oceanography,” and it’s pretty mysterious, much like the seashell. It gives his music special meaning – although he never really had any particular message in mind when he came up with it.
“I didn’t want to just be Brian Kelly or The Brian Kelly Band. There’s no real reason but I like the way (Oceanography) sounds, I like the phonetic quality or the rhythm of the word,” said Kelly, who is performing on Wednesday, Sept. 11 at PublicHouse in Springfield and Thursday, Sept. 12 at the Axe & Fiddle in Cottage Grove. “To give you an idea of how long I’ve had the name, it was available on MySpace.”
Kelly has devised a revolutionary way of producing music videos – which is the main reason why you should check out one of his two local shows.
He’s most proud of “Monterey,” which chronicles his sister Cori’s long and painful fight with breast cancer.
“She was very sick and she passed away while I was trying to release my new album,” Kelly said. “Cori was an elementary school art teacher, and she encouraged me to pursue music.”
Eight years older than Brian, Cori died in 2020. She was 51.
As Cori’s caregiver for the last year of her life, he gathered up plenty of her old photos, which helped him greatly with his healing process, and those pictures now are a part of “Monterey,” the opening track to his full-length “Thirteen Songs About Driving Nowhere In Alphabetical Order.”
It took hours and hours of editing and splicing, making sure that all the photos matched the music. It’s a painstaking process, but also a labor of love, Kelly said.
“You get it down to its purest form,” Kelly said. “‘Monterey’ was therapeutic more than anything else.”
Kelly, who grew up in the Bay Area, said his sister’s words of encouragement will always stick with him.
“I think family and experiences define your art,” Kelly said. “The last show that Cori came to she wrote a lot of encouraging words in a long text message. So I saved it and I’ll always have it when I need some inspiration.”
