JOURNAL EXCERPT: Artists Celebrate Drivin N Cryin’s Kevn Kinney with 100-Song Tribute Project

EDITOR’S NOTE: Below is an excerpt from a story in our Summer 2024 journal issue in honor of Drivin N Cryin’s ongoing tribute album compilation. You can read the whole story — and much more — in that issue, here. And please consider supporting No Depression with a subscription to keep our roots music journalism, in print and online, going all year long.

Several years ago, a large white conversion van traveled up from New Orleans to Hattiesburg on a dark Mississippi night. A police car started following, the cop figuring he’d catch an easy DWI. The blue lights began flashing just as a fully sober Kevn Kinney began making his way onto the exit ramp. Casting his eyes upon the long-haired man behind the wheel, the officer asked to search the van. It was a mess — papers, fast-food wrappers, and musical instruments strewn everywhere — but no drugs to be found.

Eyeing the guitars, the cop asked, “Are you in a band?”

“Yeah,” Kinney answered sheepishly.

“What band you in?”

“Drivin’ n’ Cryin’”

The cop tilted his head before asking, “Like, ‘Straight to Hell?’”

“Yeah,” Kinney confirmed.

The cop paused a beat. “What happened?”

“The music business” is the simplest and most obvious answer. Over the last 40 years, Kinney became — and has remained — a cult hero and critical darling. He’s been in the business long enough to see his Atlanta-based band, Drivin N Cryin, influence multiple generations of musicians and his songs move through several genres, including college rock, indie rock, Southern rock, alternative, y’allternative, alt-country, and Americana. Yet through it all, he’s never strayed from the literate, prolific, observant songwriting his many admirers know and love.

Now, thanks to the vision and tireless efforts of his wife, Anna Jensen, Kinney is getting the recognition he has long deserved with a 100-song tribute project released in batches starting last November. Fifty songs are split between four physical albums, with 50 more tracks to be released as digital singles each Friday until September 2025. Each physical collection is named after a line from the Drivin N Cryin song “Let’s Go Dancing.” The first, Said the Firefly to the Hurricane, coincided with 2023’s Record Store Day on Black Friday. The rest — Split a Mountain in Two with a Flake of Snow, Said the Falling Rain to the Open Flame, and Stopped a Freight Train with a Grain of Sand — will come out over the next 12 months.

Going Big

The project began casually. Kinney turned 60 during the height of the pandemic, so in lieu of a traditional party, Jim Barber (Drivin N Cryin’s former manager) and Todd Ploharksi, (founder of Athens record store Low Yo Yo Stuff) encouraged Jensen to compile video submissions of several of Kinney’s musical friends and colleagues performing his songs. “It was a big surprise for Kevn,” she explains. “It was like three hours-plus of music. The material that came in was so amazing that we were like, ‘Okay, we have to do something official with this.’”

It wasn’t the first time they discussed a tribute album. “It was something I felt should have happened already,” Jensen admits. “There was talk of a tribute album happening sometime around the 25th anniversary [of the band] that just never came to be. Now I’m realizing probably why — because it just takes a lot of time and work.”

Barber and Ploharski encouraged Jensen to go ahead with the project. Artists who were friends of Kinney’s, or who had been inspired by Drivin N Cryin, lined up to help celebrate the songwriter and frontman’s 60th birthday in grand style. “I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly people said yes,” Jensen says. “Each time it was like an exciting, celebratory day, and I definitely started to gain confidence from some of his friends that are already pretty well established. … It gave me the confidence to at least try to do this. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I wanted a ‘go big or go home’ style of approach.”

Each of the four physical releases begins with a different version of “Let’s Go Dancing.” The first volume, Said the Firefly to the Hurricane, begins with a cover by Drive-by Truckers’ Patterson Hood and R.E.M. alum Peter Buck. “I’ve loved ‘Let’s Go Dancing’ since the first time I ever heard it,” Hood says. “I ended up filming myself playing it on Peter Buck’s front porch with Peter and Scott [McCaughey] during lockdown for the occasion of Kevn’s birthday and that led directly to us recording it for this project.”

For Hood, honoring Kinney and Drivin N Cryin this way was obvious. “I first heard of them around the time of their second album and saw them in Huntsville, Alabama, at the long gone Don’t Care Danceteria in early 1988. They were fantastic and I have been a fan ever since.”

“Let’s Go Dancing” remains a fan favorite due to its timeless, underdog outlook. “It’s just this really strange enigma of a song,” Kinney says. “A lot of my songs I just see in dreams or channel them or they just kind of come to me very quickly. This was one of them. But it’s one of these songs. … Emmylou Harris, when I met her, she said, ‘I really love that song, “Let’s Go Dancing!”’ And I remember I met The Edge and he goes, ‘Oh yeah, Drivin N Cryin! I really love “Let’s Go Dancing”!’”

Hearing each of these different treatments of the song inspired Jensen to compile each volume with a different vibe. As a result, Said the Firefly to the Hurricane leans more indie/avant-garde, while Split a Mountain in Two with a Flake of Snow focuses more on country and soul. Said the Falling Rain to the Open Flame rocks the hardest, and Stopped a Freight Train with a Grain of Sand , according to Jensen, finishes off the project with a “softer, but nuanced” sound.

The songs chosen represent all stages of Drivin N Cryin’s canon and Kinney’s solo career. Some of the artists stuck closely to the original arrangements, while others took greater liberties. The four volumes feature big, nationally known names sprinkled with more regional artists, such as Anna Kramer & Easy Now, Clay Harper, Lynx Deluxe, Rare Birds, and Puddles the Clown. “One of the things that Anna’s done that I’m really happy with is she’s included a lot of our Atlanta music community,” Kinney gushes. “She’s really part of that fabric. She’s part of the Star Bar and The Earl, and she’s incorporated a lot of those people into this project, which I’m really happy about. People who are going to be famous, or maybe never will be.”

Legendary figures such as Wreckless Eric appear, as does Athens’ Pylon Reenactment Society (formed by former Pylon Vanessa Briscoe Hay). The project also includes such famous musicians as Jamey Johnson, Shovels & Rope, Darius Rucker, and Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit, who recorded Drivin N Cryin’s “Honeysuckle Blue” on their Georgia Blue covers album in 2021. For this project, they contributed a scorching “Look What You’ve Done to Your Brother.”

Rucker is no stranger to Drivin N Cryin. In 2017, he recorded a version of “Straight to Hell” for his album When Was the Last Time, with cameos by country superstars Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, and Lady A’s Charles Kelley. For Split a Mountain in Two with a Flake of Snow, however, Rucker chose “Lost and Found” from Kinney’s first solo album, 1990’s MacDougal Blues. (Elizabeth Cook and Butch Walker handle “Straight to Hell” on Split a Mountain in Two with a Flake of Snow as a powerful duet that rivals the original.)

Another highlight is Alejandro Escovedo’s version of “Another Scarlet Butterfly” from Drivin N Cryin’s 1986 debut, Scarred But Smarter. “Alejandro’s definitely has a vibe,” says Jensen with a laugh. “We were saying it could be like the entry song for a show like The Sopranos or something.”

Escovedo cut the track in Italy while he was working on his latest album, Echo Dancing, which re-imagines songs from across his catalog. The record’s co-producers, Don Antonio and Nicola Peruch, helped him figure out how to rework the song. “[Kinney has] written so many great songs, but that one really struck me,” says Escovedo. “The lyrics were what connected me to the song. The words are amazing, I just felt this doesn’t need a lot of heavy arrangement in any way. It should be stark. And it should just really showcase the lyrics. And I think we did a good job on it.”

Escovedo listened to several of Kinney’s songs before settling on his pick, but Aaron Lee Tasjan knew right away which one he wanted to tackle. For his contribution, Tasjan rearranged “Broken Hearts and Auto Parts,” one of Kinney’s most-loved songs from his 2002 solo album of the same name. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful record,” Tasjan says. For his version, he stripped away the guitars and drums and delivered it as a straight-up piano ballad. “He really seemed to love it,” Tasjan smiles. “And nothing in the world makes me happier than making Kevn Kinney happy.”

‘They Just Didn’t Pick a Lane’

Originally from Milwaukee, Kinney moved to Atlanta in 1982 for a day job. “I was not a popular musician in Milwaukee,” he confesses. “I had a punk rock band that every other band member and their girlfriends came and saw on Tuesday nights. We had no draw.” He otherwise split his time working as a pharmacy technician and at Radio Doctors, “the absolute best record store ever in the world,” he says.

Upon the urging of his older brother (and fellow musician), Mikel, Kinney moved south and found work at a sewage plant making a few bucks more per hour than at the pharmacy back in Milwaukee. Still, for the first six months or so in Atlanta, he lived out of his car.

Kinney eventually teamed up with Tim Nielsen and Paul Lenz, both members of the Atlanta-based band The Nightporters. “They were the opening act for R.E.M. back in ’84, ’85,” says Kinney. “They saw me play and Tim told me that I was going to be in his band.” Instead, Nielsen and Lenz quit their band and formed the first version of Drivin N Cryin with Kinney. “We sold out, like, our second show, so it was history from then on, you know?”

Buzz about the band’s live sets as well as their first album, Scarred But Smarter, led them to sign with Island Records, which released Whisper Tames the Lion in 1988 and Mystery Road the following year. (Lenz left the group before Lion and drummer Jeff Sullivan replaced him.) Each record garnered more success than the last, and the band got even more exposure by opening for R.E.M. on their Green tour.

The title track of Fly Me Courageous in 1991 became a rock radio staple, resulting in a certified-gold record. Released in 1993, Smoke was a loud musical assault, yet sounded more joyous and celebratory than the grunge coming out of Seattle. Despite some airplay on rock radio and MTV, the record failed to reach the success of its predecessor. The band then moved to Geffen Records and dialed back the Drivin for a little more Cryin — or at least a return to a balance of the two.

The band’s name has always perfectly encapsulated the juxtaposition of its sound — part hard-driving rock, part introspective folk, and part sorrowful country. But that has also been a bit of a curse. “I know that one of the issues with Drivin N Cryin, as far as lacking marketability, was that they just didn’t pick a lane” Jensen says. “They’re kind of the forebears of Americana, but they never get any credit for that, not to be negative.”

For whatever reasons, Drivin N Cryin never reached the heights many of their contemporaries did. “Quasi-political self-help love songs is kind of what we do,” Kinney says with a laugh. “And they don’t have that section [in record stores].”

Hood can sympathize. “[Kinney’s] pretty underrated as a songwriter,” Hood insists. “And Drivin N Cryin is often overlooked also. Their most famous songs are great but only scratch the surface on how fine his songwriting, and singing and guitar playing, is.”

Close to 40 years on, Drivin N Cryin is still actively touring and putting out albums (their latest being 2019’s Live the Love Beautiful). They’ve also acted unwittingly as a sort of farm team for guitarists. In addition to Buren Fowler, who handled lead guitar during the band’s commercial peak, other guitar-slingers that have filled the role include Sadler Vaden (who went on to join The 400 Unit) and Tasjan (who now has a critically acclaimed solo career and experimental new record, Stellar Evolution, which was released in April). Laur Joamets, formerly with Sturgill Simpson, is Drivin N Cryin’s current guitarist.

Tasjan first saw Drivin N Cryin on MTV when he was 11 years old. “I think it was maybe Courtney Love hosting 120 Minutes,” he recalls. “She played the video for ‘Honeysuckle Blue’ and I just heard that riff. I was taken with that kind of music at the time; that style of jammy Southern rock — a guitar riff with a real attitude to it, but it had some sort of melody that went over top of it that was really memorable and hooky. I became one of the biggest 11-year-old Drivin N Cryin fans.”

Mostly, though, Drivin N Cryin’s  music made him feel understood. “I just loved any anything that made me feel like I could see myself in the song somehow,” Tasjan says. “I think that’s what’s so great about Kevn’s music. It sounds simple enough that you really have no problem finding your own story within what he’s written.

Mutually Beneficial

One of the most impressive elements of this tribute is how each contributor connected with the music itself. But as Jensen maintains, the project needed to be “mutually beneficial to everyone.”

Additionally, three elements differentiate this project from regular Drivin N Cryin releases or Kinney solo albums. First, Jensen created all of the original cover artwork, with each piece reflecting the title of the release. Second, all the artists that participated in the project were told they could keep their masters. And third, at Kinney’s insistence, all proceeds from physical sales are going to charity.

Anna Jensen and Kevn Kinney with their dogs and Jensen’s original artwork. (Photo by Arvin Temkar, courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Many of the contributing artists wanted Kinney to earn a decent profit from the project, but Jensen stresses, “We feel like just shining a light on his material is enough of a benefit for us. We want the artists to benefit from this, as well as the charities. So, if Alejandro’s song would get picked up by something like The Sopranos, it would be his master to sell!”

All proceeds from physical sales of the albums will be divided evenly among five charities: the SIMS Foundation, which Escovedo co-founded to provide mental health resources and substance-use services for musicians and music industry professionals; How Big Is Your Dream, Ike Stubblefield’s education-based youth empowerment organization; Out of the Woods, which offers assistance for children with brain and spinal injuries; the FarmLink Project, which enables farmers and food banks to collaborate in fighting food waste and insecurity; and the Jesse Malin recovery fund through Sweet Relief.

Kinney still is in awe of the outpouring of love that resulted in this project, as well as Jensen’s determination to make it happen. “If she would have asked me before she called anybody, I would have said, ‘No. Don’t do that,’” he recalls with a laugh. “It doesn’t make any sense! I mean, it’s hard to sell records. It’s hard to navigate the waters of musicians and their management and record label egos; it’s almost an impossible task. I wouldn’t dare do it! And then she said, ‘Well, what if I did four [albums]?’ I said, ‘Are you out of your freakin’ mind?’”

For Jensen, it’s just a logical and practical position to take. “I was thinking just that how these tribute records come out pretty regularly from people who have passed,” she says. “And it’s such a shame that it can’t be done for someone that we love and admire while they’re still here to witness that validation.”