Cigarettes, Guns, and Rugged Recordings

Written and Photographed by Rick Perez, @goodtimerickstudios

An afternoon with folk rock musician Kal Madsen

Malibu, California, USA

I followed a red car through a neighborhood that was minutes from the Pacific Ocean. The houses had large properties with horse stables and the Santa Monica Mountains towered in the distance. The red car led me from paved streets to a dirt road, taking us away from the houses to a glorious clearing at the foot of the mountains. After parking in a dirt lot, the singer songwriter Kal Madsen emerged from the red car; he was taking me around to one of his favorite trails in North Malibu, California.

Kal Madsen recently released an album called ‘In Yer Tomb’, a compilation of songs that gave me nostalgic feelings of my days of living on the Central Coast of California. When Kal suggested that we talk and shoot in a nature preserve, I thought it would be a perfect way to combine his folk style of music and my sentimentality of taking photos on trails of the Central Coast.

The trail began at a wide opening between the mountains, pulling us into an empty river bed of tall grasses and burnt oak trees, evidence of the fires that ravaged these hills not too many years ago.

“Our house burnt down out here,” Kal revealed, pointing to the distance. “We used to live right over this hill, up the mountain a little bit. The fire came all the way down,” he continued pointing, this time towards the burn oak. I looked at him in sort of disbelief; I only heard about the fires in the news and never met anyone who had been effected by them.

“I’m a really family oriented person,” he said as we walked over rocks on the trail . “I live with them now because I want to be with them. With the fires and everything, we have been through a lot.” I couldn’t imagine losing my childhood home, having to choose a few things I treasure and escaping with my family. I would want to stay close with them, too.

Switching topics, Kal narrated the story of how he got into music. Always a creative person, he grew up making paintings and spray paint stencils. However, he needed another way to express himself and decided to learn guitar. “I would write a bunch of poetry, stream of consciousness type stuff,” he reminisced, “and take all those pages and figure out chords I liked and organize them into songs.”

Although he discovered a new way to express himself , one insecurity Kal has had since playing music was the lack of confidence in his singing abilities. He would try different things to overcome this self-doubt and he told me a sample memory of one of the things he tried.

“This English I girl I know, her mom rolled me the fattest cigarette and I could only smoke a quarter of it. Later, when I tried to record this song, I took the rest of the cigarette and tried to dumb my brain down by getting light headed from smoking it so I wouldn't be judging myself when I tried to sing.” We laughed at the absurdity of the story and I compared it to having liquid courage with alcohol; but that feeling of doubting yourself can be all too real and sometimes you have try things to get over those feelings. “I was too insecure to sing, but for some reason I just needed to do it.”

After years of overcoming those insecurities, Kal put those songs together into his latest album, ‘In Yer Tomb,’ a lo-fi folk rock album that he recorded in his bedroom. Since making music, he had wrestled with the idea of working with a producer or not, something that many musicians struggle with as well.

“I was dating this girl and she was leading me to believe that I needed a producer to make an album,” he explains. “In world of artists like me who are trying to make music, the bottom level world of trying to figure it out, there’s a debate of a necessity of record labels and producers. I never believed that, so I made the album myself.”

He had worked with a producer on an album he released before ‘In Yer Tomb’, but felt like he lost himself during that process. “It wasn’t an accurate representation of what I’m trying to do,” Kal said as we rounded a bend on the trail. “The record sounded great but because I let another producer work on it, the album felt a little generic. “

For ‘In Yer Tomb’, Kal wanted to record it himself, to make it authentic to his voice. “I like the sound of recording in my room,” he explained. “It feels more genuine. You could hear my birds in the background, my dogs walking around, and you can hear me getting up and turning off the recorder. Doing it myself gives me more control of what I’m doing while making these rugged recordings.” To me, the whole album sounded like something from the past, and there is a real intimacy and rawness I felt while listening to it. I think his recording style contributed to that feeling.

We stopped at a giant clearing with toppled trees and shrubs. Kal pulled out his toy gun and we started taking pictures while he told me about his fascination with cowboy culture.

“I like Western movies and I really love cowboys, probably because I love Westerns and the lore of cowboy tales. It definitely effects how I make music because it effects the person I want to be. I idolize cowboys. They have this cool, man’s man aesthetic that I really want to embody.” He told me that someone he really looks up to is the musician Johnny Cash and even though he wasn’t what you would consider a cowboy, Cash had the “spirit and morals of a cowboy.”

He went on to tell me how he admired the rough and seemingly simple life of a cowboy. Kal compares his life to what he thinks how they lived and gave me an example of this comparison.

Over New Years, he sprained his ankle and went to the doctor to check it out. That experience made him think of what a cowboy would do in that situation. “Isn’t it crazy that I’m some 22 year old that got drunk on New Years Eve and hurt my foot like an idiot. Now I’m over here getting some insane technology to find out exactly whats wrong with me. I felt so lucky. On the counterpoint, I thought about how these cowboys were living and it’s really noble and inspirational, like they were just trying to get by.”

As the sun was setting, we headed back towards the parking lot. We talked more about music and movies and other projects he is involved in.

I really liked talking to Kal. I appreciated his child-like admiration for cowboys and I could tell that it really does influence his life. His yearning for simplicity shows in his modest recordings and the fact that he wants to work by himself plays into the whole ‘Lone Ranger’ trope. His music stirs feelings from the past because his whole aesthetic is derived from historical tales. The little Kal who just wanted to express himself has really found his voice as an adult. Like his idol Johnny Cash, Kal Madsen is starting to embody the morals and spirit of a cowboy but in his own, beautiful way. I look forward to following the tale of this California Cowboy.