The liner notes to this reissue of hippie harpist Carol Kleyn's 1976 debut would make a great period film, perhaps with Zoe Kazan in the lead. In prose that evokes a sense of discovery and excitement, Kleyn describes her introduction to the counterculture as a freshman at UC Santa Barbara, where she wrote songs for her poetry class before dropping out to concentrate on music full-time. Kleyn shacked up with one-man psychedelic band Bobby Brown, who brought her a harp for her birthday one year. Rather than take lessons at the university, she taught herself to play the instrument and promised to perform her own songs exclusively. Soon she was lugging that harp-- which was nearly as big as she was-- in and out of buses, down streets and alleyways, and across fields to busk for passersby at street corners, community fairs, and Renaissance festivals all over California.
This musical coming-of-age story eventually becomes a Zelig-style romp through 1970s pop culture, as Kleyn toured with Gregg Allman and hobnobbed with the Eagles, Frank Sinatra, Liza Minelli, and Sly Stone, among many other contemporaries. She came close to signing with a label, specifically Allman home base Capricorn, but instead she released three self-funded albums on her own. Rather than achieve success as defined by the music industry, Kleyn went on to become a legend among crate diggers and harp-folk enthusiasts. The twist ending: Reading these liner notes, it's clear Kleyn prefers her relative anonymity to anything else that might have been.
The epilogue: More than three decades after self-releasing her debut, Kleyn signed her first record deal with Drag City, which means she now shares a label with that other indie harpist, Joanna Newsom. Kleyn's first proper release is this reissue of Love Has Made Me Stronger, a collection of original songs that translate strummed hippie folk music to the plucks and glissandi of the harp. It's a product of its time and place, made by a social and musical free spirit who gently tested the strictures of West Coast pop music not only in her choice of instrument but also in her relentlessly sunny disposition. This is the sort of album you might identify with Laurel Canyon in the late 60s, not with the post-Watergate bicentennial.
In 2011, that mountain child sensibility may seem a little naïve, especially when Kleyn sings, "Come on, let's sing the world a love song," on "Blackbird", before performing a hiccupping imitation of birdsong. And yet, that performance-- which sounds like Buddy Holly at a commune-- is so whimsical as to be both endearing and commanding. Love Has Made Me Stronger is fascinating as a pop artifact that's more extroverted than Vashti Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day and more insular than Judee Sill's Heart Food, but its true impact derives from the sheer force of Kleyn's personality, which makes hippie cheer feel brave.
Kleyn displays an intriguing cross section of styles and influences, a range that ostensibly results from her being self-taught. She strums and picks her harp like a guitar on "Baby Come Close" and "Love's Goin' Round", and on "Street Song", she plays the instrument almost like a dulcimer, percussively plucking countermelodies that sound both tender and slightly foreboding. When Kleyn trades the harp for keys on the album's second half, however, she loses some of what makes her distinctive. On songs like "Well Glory Be" and "You Know I Love You", Kleyn's keyboard playing is more rudimentary than inventive, more technically constrained than artistically free. More often, though, Love Has Made Me Stronger's rough-around-the-edges imperfections only allow Kleyn to convey her spirited optimism all the more forcefully. That sort of music boldness never goes out of style.
