REGGAE JAZZ CLASSICS | 7IN VINYL

Kennebec, Kennebec is the creative vessel of Portland-based composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Eric Phillips, whose work delivers a lush, boundary-pushing symphonic blend of globally inspired American chamber-folk, ambient jazz, gospel, new age, and alternative hip-hop. Following collaborations with artists such as Samuel T. Herring, Sudan Archives, Yazz Ahmed, Joe Armon-Jones, and Alfa Mist, and scoring for the 2024 Oscar-nominated film 'The Holdovers' and Barack Obama's Netflix series 'Working,' Phillips returns with 'Listen,' the first single to be taken from new album 'The Water Wheel,' a conceptually rich third album exploring impermanence, love, and the cycles of time. A de facto concept album about impermanence and the cyclical nature of life on Earth, 'The Water Wheel' was born from a period of significant change in Phillips' life. After falling in love, Phillips struggled to reconcile his newfound happiness with the existential anxiety that comes from living in a world that's never felt more unstable. As the world around him became more uncertain, Phillips found himself gravitating, as both a listener and a creator, to music that is inherently more and more soothing. Locking himself away in his home studio, he found a tonic in the creation of 'The Water Wheel'; an album that's a settling, cathartic celebration of life, meant as a balm for our chaotic times. It's an acknowledgement that at once things never end, they only begin again, yet they're always changing and evolving, never staying the same, and the omnipresent contrast between impermanence and timelessness. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the album's first single, 'Listen'. An instant earworm, the initial spark for 'Listen' came from Phillips improvising a guitar riff over a James Brown break. After much evolution, it grew into what we hear today: an acoustic beat-driven wonder with a soaring chorus and the kind of melody that you're destined to remember for a long time. Lyrically, 'Listen' is also one of the first tracks in Kennebec's repertoire that carries Phillips' own written voice. While he'd historically recorded other vocalists, this album was the first he wrote lyrics for. He'd long been attempting to process his own thoughts of impermanence, love and fears of loss; and, in the midst of these cycles in his own life, he found himself searching for solace in the written word, documenting the timeless changing of the seasons in both a literal and metaphorical sense, and trying to remember to feel the timeless amidst the tumult without turning any of it away. 'This was the first album where I wrote lyrics, and I found myself writing about the tension between the beauty and the fear that can come with falling in love,' says Phillips. 'In 'Listen', I liked how the lyric 'might fall in' mirrors the descending minor chord-it carries a sense of uncertainty, of hesitation. But the song ultimately resolves - allowing oneself to let go into the love. At it's heart, it's about being quiet enough to Listen, and open enough to receive.