Between 1976 and 1983, wayfaring West Coast harpist and vocalist Carol Kleyn released three albums on her own tiny Turtle Dove label. With a beatific spirit that seems sent directly from central casting and a nomadic history that includes Renaissance Festival performances and episodes of street busking, Kleyn’s work eventually garnered a small but loyal following amongst fans of the era's private-press albums. Beginning with their 2011 reissue of her debut Love Has Made Me Stronger, Drag City has been reissuing Kleyn’s albums one at a time and making them available in digital format for the first time. Her third album, 1983’s Return of the Silkie, might just be the best of three. A semi-concept album consisting solely of harp, voice, and the occasional bark from a distant harbor seal, the album is at the very least the purest available distillation of her unique and memorable musical vision.
As detailed in the album’s liner notes, a silkie or selkie is a mythological half-human, half-seal creature that appears frequently in the folklore of the Scottish and Irish islands. Time and again the songs on Return of the Silkie make allusion to these silkies, and in Kleyn’s hands they come to serve as a symbol for man’s complicated relationship with the ocean and the natural world. A distinct sense of yearning courses through these songs, a yearning (possibly from the POV of a silkie) for freedom and an escape from the modern world into the untouched paradise of nature. Throughout the album Kleyn sings about nature with a reverential passion that many artists reserve for religious hymns or romantic love songs, balancing the tranquility of her gentle harp playing with ominous tidings for those who might seek to harm the natural environment.
Engaging though the album can be, suffice it to say this is a record without much potential crossover appeal. The notion of a female harpist singing pacific songs about nature and seal-women is likely something that either has some innate appeal for you or it doesn’t. Even for those of us with an avowed fondness for the once-lost albums of such folkie artists as Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs, or Sibylle Baier, Return of the Silkie can test one’s mettle. Kleyn’s simple, direct lyrics can threaten to shift into trite post-hippie platitudes at a moment’s notice, and in places her instrumental harp passages can border uncomfortably close to new age draftiness.
For the most part, however, the clarity and simplicity of Kleyn’s music works in the album’s favor. Her second album, 1980’s Takin’ the Time, was recorded with a full band and produced with an FM-ready soft-rock polish that hasn’t allowed it to age particularly well. By stripping things back to just voice and harp, Return of the Silkie has a much more organic, out-of-time feel. The album was recorded close enough to the water in Laguna Beach that the barks of harbor seals can be heard in the background-- yet another of the album’s quirky little details that might serve as a litmus test to measure how jaded and/or grumpy a given listener might be. At any rate, the album’s naturalistic production is a fine match for the effervescent likes of “Iaqua,” or the instrumental title track, on which Kleyn’s harp notes effortlessly mimic the shimmer of sunlight and sea spray.
The album’s most intriguing track is the one which deviates the furthest from its nature themes. “Hello Mister Drifter” details the meeting between a lonely young woman and a mysterious drifter in a fashion that manages to be at once poignant and unsettling. “I know that I’m ugly and that I’m just 13,” the song’s narrator sings to her new acquaintance, “but I don’t think you care. You’ve got smiles for me and you.” Needless to say, a song written in this vein today would almost certainly wind up as a dark cautionary tale, but here it is treated with Kleyn’s typical breeziness and sunny good will, ending by all evidence with a budding new friendship between two lonely souls. It’s a track that serves as another small indicator of just how far removed Return of the Silkie is from the contemporary musical landscape. This peculiar sense of distance and otherness serves to summarize some of appeal of vintage private-press albums in general and helps to make Return of the Silkie the beguiling point of departure that it is.
