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Stephen Kellogg's Complicated Bonds of Friendship • James Campion Stephen Kellogg is always writing songs. Even when he is without a guitar or a whistle on his lips, he is composing. Sometimes those songs, coming as they will from that mystical place that artists rarely fathom, they might form a theme. This is what happened to him last year.

Suddenly, each song that came followed the next about one thing; friendship – old friends, new friends, lost friends, what friends mean and how that meaning can change with age and geography and circumstance. And don’t you know, some of those songs attracted friends and colleagues, who helped him bring those songs home. This is what makes up Kellogg’s latest album, To you, old friend, which drops this month but is currently available on vinyl.
     Aptly titled, and like Kellogg’s always literal and unflinching lyrics, it is straight to the point. It is also one of his finest, from its execution, personnel, and sound. The mysteriously unfocused cover photo from a time gone by, with faces strange yet so familiar, echoes in the title, which recalls the opening to a letter never sent. And then there are those songs, “Old Friend,” “The Waitress,” “Ghosted,” “Harbor,” and “Old Guitars” that do not mince words and bring all the emotions to the fore. Even the record’s one cover, Bob Dylan’s stirring, “Buckets of Rain” with its “Friends will arrive, friends will disappear” perfectly underscores the narrative.
    
 “I started with a batch of songs and then started noticing, ‘Wow, they’re all about friendship as seen from different angles,’” recalls Kellogg when we sat down to chat upon the album’s completion. “I had recorded some other songs that I decided not to put on this record. Songs that I felt were ready for release, but once I realized this is where things needed to go, I locked in and finished the stuff that completed the theme about friendship.” 
     
The album wastes no time, opening with “Old Friend,” the song cycle’s central thesis: “Used to have so much to say…,” Kellogg sings with a hint of sentimentality. “…it just ain’t that way these days.” In a bit of meta meets meta he is joined by an old friend and celebrated songwriter, Lori McKenna, whom he met 25 years ago and wrote with a decade earlier. “I was nervous to hit her up,” Kellogg admits sheepishly. “It had been a while, and she's sort of grown to be one of the greatest songwriters of all time, if you look at the breadth of her catalog.” This includes a 2016 Grammy for Best Country Song for co-writing the hit single “Girl Crush” performed by Little Big Town and taking that category again the following year for writing Tim McGraw’s “Humble and Kind” to name just two of many successful songs. 
     
Kellogg and McKenna’s examination of losing touch with people over the years due to either age, geography, or simply the changing tides of ideology and interests ponders emotional distance as more than a symptom but perhaps a sign that you were never friends in the first place: “Life takes us down different roads ‘till we change / Or stay the same, old friend.”
     
During their time together, the two songwriters confronted the idea of friendship without compromise. “We talked for about five hours and wrote for about forty-five minutes,” Kellogg laughs. “It was very Zen the way it went, and I knew when I left her house, that was sort of the beginning of like, ‘Whoa, maybe this is what the record is.’”
     
In late January, Kellogg headlined a wonderful night of music at City Winery, the highlight being his debut (for a NYC audience, anyway), of a heartfelt tribute to a woman from his past who had recently died. But brilliantly, before revealing this to the audience, he simply read a letter the woman had sent years before remembering her middle-school relationship with Stephen. Turns out this was his first girlfriend, which makes up the construct of “The Waitress,” the second track on To you, old friend; an homage to a character that represents those friends we’ve known as teens that trouble seems to follow for the rest of their lives, which for her, ended tragically young. 
     
Bravely edging into the maudlin with, “She was a waitress, who taught me to kiss / If heaven exists, class is dismissed,” Kellogg, as is his wont, adroitly pulls back from the abyss with the withering line, “When she moved to California it was like it always is / Running from your problems, but your problems know you hid.”
     “When I heard she died, I realized she had never left my DNA and never will, you know,” Kellogg muses. “It was like the awakening of a young heart."
     
Kellogg credits his deep emotive dives on To you, old friend to the producer of some of the tracks, Chris Ruggiero. Stephen joyfully remembers, “Chris said to me, ‘Kellogg, you're a really vulnerable guy. I challenge you to write even more vulnerable songs, say things that you feel you shouldn't say.’
     
The album also deals with perceptions of friendship, as in “Ghosted,” a song that features some of Kellogg’s best falsetto work, which accentuates the spectral vibes inspired on piano by producer of the first three tracks, Josh Kaufman, another long-time colleague with whom he roomed with on tour years before. “Josh's contribution to those first three songs that he produced cannot be overstated,” Kellogg says. Binding the collaboration edict together nicely, Kaufman brought in his wife Annie for some stellar background vocals that underscore the emotional density of the tracks. And thanks to recording in Kaufman’s home studio, those songs also expertly maintain the intimacy of how Kellogg penned and arranged them.
     
In “Ghosted,” when Kellogg sings, “I always loved you, I always will / But the way that it went down bothers me still” there is a hurt there that lingers, but the songwriter also warns this is not merely his interpretation of being shut out of a friend’s life, but one of universal pain of being rejected or, worse still, forgotten. “At this point in my life, I'm not writing songs about one person,” Kellogg tells me with some measure of intense feeling breaking through. “But I am writing about my life. And if you break my fucking heart, it's my fucking heartbreak to write about, and some people have broken my heart big time, and I just feel like, why am I protecting that shit? I'm stuck with the pain, and I'm allowed to make sense of what happens to me.”
     
Kellogg follows this up with one of his sweetest melodies in “Harbor” in which he asks the album’s key question, “Why do some of us get left behind?” The first track on the record produced by Chris Ruggiero, the man who prodded him to break his vulnerability meter (this is like asking Jack Black to get nuttier), comes through loud and clear. The line, “A promise is forever, that don’t change cause you’re a kid” crushes me every time. It is the perfect sentiment for this idea of where a friendship resides long after its initial spark – a rare sentiment that Kellogg manages to frame in a few words sung tenderly.
     
Another decision Kellogg made in including more friends on the project, was to have Chadwick Stokes from the now-defunct, Boston-based indie band, the Dispatch take some verses on “Harbor” (fellow bandmate, Brad Corrigan adds backups). “I had always wanted to do a duet with him,” says Kellogg. “I've been a Dispatch fan for a number of years and before I knew what I was doing with this record I had a version without him, but I had always liked how Willie Nelson does his duets, so Chad fit perfectly.”
     
Two tracks don’t easily fall under the “friendship” theme literally, “Old Guitars,” and even more so, “Kiss the Ring,” which is a song Kellogg playfully explains as “composite narcissism.” Mining the negative feelings has always worked a different kind of muscle for Stephen on several levels (see “Ghosted”). He doesn’t go negative often, but when he does it is for a good reason and it is usually questioning his own self-worth as an artist, a husband, a father, a son, and a friend. His most biting examples can be found in 2018’s Objects in the Mirror, which until To you, my friend, I considered his apex. But when we spoke, the former’s connection to friendship and the sharing of fears and grievances were revealed.      
     
“That first verse ‘Old Guitars,’ ‘…you're shot from a cannon again and again and you no longer feel the adrenaline / You put on a smile and try to pretend that you're happy and maybe you are’ is how I felt much of the last five years. I'm just trying to get myself charged up to get on stage and do the thing and write the next song and figure out what the future holds and not just reach back relentlessly for the past. And in writing that song down and making it I’ve come to terms with these feelings more.”
     
Those feelings, Stephen explained, come from years on the road, a working musician, that must bring it every night – rain or shine, sick or not, the show must go on. On his previous record, Keep It Up, Kid, he mined similar trepidations in the chilling “If Anyone is Listening,” which Stephen played while I sat a foot away on a stage during my book event in NYC. It was a stirring admission of insecurity about his art and his life. In my several conversations I’ve had with him over the years, this is what he is expunging here: “I’m telling you Sancho, I’m telling you true / If the work doesn’t kill me, it’s gonna kill you / Some days I imagine us being set free / A charger for you and a white horse for me.”
     
“Sancho's my tour manager of twenty-five years, and he's not with me now after this song, not because of this song, thank God, we're fine,” he began when I pressed him on it. “But that's how it was for us on the road at the point when I was writing this song. I mean, it was ‘Wow, we might die out here, for real!’ It feels like I don't know what's going to happen to me if I keep going like this. It takes a certain amount of willingness to just imagine the worst. Let's see what this feels like to write this, and then I was like, ‘I gotta sing this!’”
     
On the penultimate song, and the last new one on To you, my friend, “Love Me as I Am,” Kellogg elucidates, “We're all looking for friends and I'm almost fifty and I feel like I'm turning over friends again, and I thought I'd be with certain people for the rest of my life and I'm a little sad that I won't, but I'm also pretty excited at some of the new people that are coming into my life. I don't know, what's that like for you? I mean, what's been your experience with friendship in that way?”
     
It is a good question, especially for me, because truth be told Stephen has been a great friend to me. He has supported my writing for years, appeared in my last book, Take a Sad Song – the Emotional Currency of Hey Jude. and played and appeared at its NYC 2022 book event, as mentioned above. He took every piece of half-assed advice I gave him when he worked on his own 2020 book, Objects in the Mirror - Thoughts on a perfect life from an imperfect person and has been a source of great support to my singer-songwriter, niece, Sydney Leigh. And so, in many ways, having met him nearly a decade ago, he is, as he described, that new friend that I am glad to know.
     
And that is where To you, my friend concludes, with another of our friends, Adam Duritz, and Counting Crows, who, along with his five daughters, Sophia, Adeline, Noelle, and Greta back Stephen on a remarkable version of “Almost Woke You Up” from his 2016 album, Southwest Northeast. This live taping from his time on the tour with the band is a tender lullaby of yearning to express how much a person means to another when words fail to communicate. Sometimes there just isn’t a suitable expression beyond the art, and here Stephen finds it, and of course, as Counting Crows does so well, the music brings it home.
     
Not sure if Stephen Kellogg has made his best record with To you, old friend, but it may resonate more than the others. There is a universal understanding in it that speaks to the most lasting part of this life, our connections, our support, our joy and tragedies wrapped in community, and sometimes that community is made up of two. And for that, he has done something special. I think even he has accepted it in the end: “I got the test pressing and I put it on and I just sat and listened to it. And I was like, ‘Wow, it sounds a little better than I remember it,’ which I've never said in eighteen records.”

Online AQ Weekly version:

© James Campion 5.8.25

Follow at https://www.facebook.com/jamesbartolommeocampion/ X (@FearNoArt) and Instagram (@jamescampion).
 
James Campion is the the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, "Midnight For Cinderella" and “Y”. +, “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon” + “Accidently Like a Martyr – The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon” and “Take a Sad Song…The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude" and coming in *April 2025, “Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era.”

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