In an industry ruled by short-lived trends and fads, Bolinas musician Kelly McFarling has carved her own path, unafraid to focus on what matters most: her community and her dedicated listeners. Instead of trying to stay ahead of an ever-evolving music scene, she has opted for quality over quantity by finding her niche and settling into it. By curating a sound true to her environment, Kelly has loyal, local listeners that turn out in size to her concerts, seldom as those are. Still, the industry is unforgiving, and Kelly subsidizes her living with different jobs.
“It’s funny to talk about it as a business,” she said. “It’s a real scrappy enterprise and never have I been able to only pursue music as a source of income. I’ve always participated in many different gig-economy jobs.”
Originally from Atlanta, Kelly said her music is forged from equal parts Georgia clay and California gold. Her newly released album, “Bed of a River” is 40 minutes of warm ambient Americana and country-folk with R&B-influenced vocals. She and her husband, Andrew Brennan, wrote the music over a two-year period starting in the summer of 2020, and they released the album last fall.
Kelly and Andrew, who plays lead guitar, both support their music with other jobs and bands. Andrew installs satellite dishes across West Marin for a local internet company, and Kelly works part-time as a music tutor and two nights a week as a server at Eleven. Her career has gone through many stages, but her love of playing music has held steady.
“It’s clear that playing music is not a linear path in any form, and it’s something I’ve always loved doing. I wanted to pursue it so I could justify doing it a lot,” Kelly said.
Growing up in the South, Kelly’s parents were dedicated members of their St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. She sang in the choir. “Singing harmony was one of the most powerful musical experiences I remember as a kid,” she said.
Kelly later sang in her high school choir, in a women’s quartet and with the Atlanta Young Singers of Callanwolde. At Wesleyan University, she studied music, with a focus in vocal performance. When it came time for her graduating performance, she said her vocal professor was aghast at her decision to play a country-rock show with her all-female group, Kelly McFarling & the Three-Legged Band, which covered the likes of Allison Kraus and Gillian Welch. Ultimately, she compromised, and she appeared with her band but also sang opera.
After graduating in 2005, Kelly was thrust from a bubble of like-minded musicians into a world of nine-to-fives and music groups primarily discovered through networking. “No one wanted to stay in Middletown, Conn., I suppose,” Kelly said.
She moved to Boulder, Colo., and music took a backseat as she pursued a career in outdoor education. After another move, to San Francisco in 2007, she continued work as a guide as she sought out a more secure income. “At the time, I was looking for something a little more stable,” she said. “Which is hilarious, because music is not stable at all. I always say I work full time to support my job.”
Hungry for experience and ready to dive into the local scene, she began attending open mics, where she established a network of musicians and a catalogue of songs. In 2009, she formed her own band under her name, and developed a small fan base through local shows and cross-state tours. A year later, she met Andrew while she was singing for Bay Area musician Sonya Cotton’s band, in which he played guitar.
From coffee shops to festival stages, Kelly was able to pay rent and live humbly from her earnings. But San Francisco was different back then, and the rush of playing so many shows each month eventually wore off. “That crazy atmosphere—the hype, the names, the gigs. It’s exciting at the time and those are really valuable learning experiences, but I’m not sure how much weight it carries in the long run,” Kelly said. “Curating something you’re proud of and that speaks to you as an artist is what lasts.”
When Andrew joined her band in 2014, Kelly was winding down a major phase of touring and playing shows in excess. “We felt like the brand was being diluted by playing so many shows in places where we wouldn’t get a huge draw,” Andrew said. “Now if we do small tours, it’s really more about going on a road trip, playing live music in beautiful locations.”
Kelly is independent, meaning she has no label to subsidize or organize advertising, marketing or booking. From composing to promoting, her business is entirely D.I.Y. As she’s gained experience, her work has become more organized into a cycle of writing-recording-releasing-playing. She spends time writing lyrics and matching them to musical ideas she’s composed on the piano before she and Andrew arrange instruments against them.
Though she’s usually seen behind a guitar at her shows, Kelly is first and foremost a singer and a pianist in search of a basic harmony that will allow her to explore the melodic possibilities within a song. She said her fascination with countermelody was inspired first by her church and subsequently by the female R&B singers she heard on Atlanta radio stations. Her countermelodies give nuance to what could otherwise be a simple harmony. Andrew’s arranging techniques keep the tracks tame so the vocals have space to layer.
“In the early ’90s, I was very much into R&B vocalists,” she said. “I was super drawn to melody and harmony—anything that I could sing along to with multiple parts. I’ve always been interested in the vocals, and the versatility and emotion of the human voice.”
Once they wrote and arranged “Bed of a River,” Kelly and Andrew drove to Richmond, Va., where they recorded at Spacebomb Studio. (Later, the couple re-recorded the track “Lineage” at the Panoramic Studio in Stinson Beach with producer and sound engineer Jeremy Harris.) Even after hiring a house band and traveling across the country, the cost of recording was more affordable than it would have been in the Bay Area.
Kelly paid for the recording with the money she received from streams on her song “Records,” from her 2017 album “Water Dog.” The song has almost 20 million streams on Spotify thanks to its placement on a staff-curated playlist.
Getting a song on the right playlist can catapult an artist’s streaming revenue. Though Spotify has one of the lowest payouts of the top streaming services—roughly one-third of a cent per stream—it is the most popular service. “Records” is Kelly’s most streamed song; two others have over a million streams.
Since her album’s release, Kelly has played just two shows to promote it, to sold-out daytime and nighttime audiences at a private home on Mount Tamalpais. Her eight-piece band played the album front to back with elegant vintage recording equipment and instruments. Three of her friends ran sound, engineering the mix for the speakers and recording the concert while a camera crew filmed the event. The footage will eventually be released for free, she said.
“That event was so special. It was music that was written during an experience that I shared with the community,” Kelly said. “It felt right to play it for everyone.”
Earlier in her career, touring and playing live was much more lucrative, Kelly said. Before streaming, people bought CDs and merch. When she was touring, her band was just a four-piece that would walk out with around $100 per person a night on a good night. Since the pandemic, Kelly said crowds have thinned at most venues and people are less likely to buy her albums since they can stream the music for a much lower cost. Whereas she used to make a small profit touring, now she mostly breaks even. “The pandemic really wiped out any shred of successful touring for a band at my level, which was already tough,” Kelly said. “It’s important to play at smaller venues in towns where you know people, [where you won’t] get ripped off by the door deal.”
Kelly’s career has come a long way from the bleachers of her church in Georgia, but in many ways, her community-powered ethos has remained intact. Playing in West Marin, for her dedicated listeners, has allowed her to carve her own path. “It seems to me that music is simply not a very lucrative business, so I think it has to be a labor of love. Knowing your audience and your instrument—that’s what I’m focused on.”
Kelly McFarling performs at the Little Saint in Healdsburg, opening for Skyway Man, on April 22. You can explore her music at www.kellymcfarling.com.