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A Musical Life: Kylie Brown

Courtesy photo

Kylie Brown is a video producer, CreativeRush event curator, storyteller and a melancholy musician. She currently plays cello with The Broslyn Bards, Raging Sea and Everything and Nothing. She began learning cello at age seven, grew up in the classical world and participated in Wichita's Youth Symphonies; she became burned out and quit before her love of music diminished. After living and working in another state for seven years, she returned to Wichita, and ended up meeting musicians, artists, and poets who reignited this love of music.

My name is Kylie Brown. I’m a Broslyn Bard and I play cello with the Bards as well as Raging Sea and Everything and Nothing.

The Broslyn Bards are a band of musicians and artists. We usually describe ourselves as a family sharing color and sound.

And they’re story tellers.

So, when I first met them, they presented this story to me, this fairytale, about a refugee who travels through the Forest of Acedia. I really was attracted to that because it was kind of dark and melancholy and that’s kind of the music and that’s kind of the music I like to play.

We ended up creating these candlelight sessions—that’s what I ended up calling them. So, every Thursday, eight or nine people would show up to my studio apartment. We would turn off all the lights in my apartment and light a candle and it was just kind of, like, whatever came out came out.

Because we’re a family sharing color and sound there was always somebody sketching and painting and creating poetry and writing lyrics, or just making up a melody on the spot.

These would go on for a couple of hours, so we got the idea to…"We should probably record these; oh, we should record an album. What a grand idea."

So we ended up using these candlelight sessions as scratch tracks and so when you listen to the album it’s very warm because it’s from these candlelight sessions.

Jedd Beaudoin is host/producer of the nationally syndicated program Strange Currency. He has also served as an arts reporter, a producer of A Musical Life and a founding member of the KMUW Movie Club. As a music journalist, his work has appeared in Pop Matters, Vox, No Depression and Keyboard Magazine.