Kinn’s “25 On 22nd Street” is as Intimate as It Gets

Imagine you’ve just walked into a club.

You heard the music as you walked through the door, so you go past the bar and down the stairs, passing posters and objects that reflect little personal pockets of taste and cultural favorites. You walk into the small but spacious room to find three people singing the most fragile song you’ve ever heard, with a couple of acoustic guitars, loose harmonies, and the natural reverb of the brick walls.

This is the sound of the latest song by Kinn, “25 On 22nd Street.”

It sounds like a recording from a live set somewhere. Because that’s exactly what it is.

You hear the gentle count in for the three musicians to start the song, and at the end, there’s a little clatter as someone perhaps puts a guitar on a stand. There’s an audible hiss going through the track. It’s all something you could get from a night where acoustic music is being played live.

But this performance feels rare.

Perhaps because it’s been recorded in this way. The musicians played the song several times and chose the one that “felt most natural” to release. But that doesn’t detract from how special it sounds. The musicians – Alyssa Kinn, Gabrielle Grace, and Cory Hale – gently weave their two guitars and three voices around each other, for the most part free of any other instrumentation other than a pleasant few seconds of piano at the end. Free of studio trickery, the natural harmonics and harmonies in their voices are attractively intimate.

It’s so alive because it’s so live.

Lyrically, the three songwriters felt “heaviness and longing” when writing the song. Lyrically it seems to reflect that, looking at how their youth feels like a different life to them, starting with a lovely opening line:

If you ever leave this town
Turn of all the San Diego lights

It leads to existential musings about how memories affect us, or if they even belong to us:

Thought that I could wash this memory down
I’m inside of it, I’m inside out

A gentle confusion about where you are, who you are, what you feel – It’s an entirely appropriate subject matter to go with this gentle musical wave that laps tenderly at the edge of your emotions.