Kohli Calhoun is on the cusp of hard-fought creative perseverance. With debut album Take Me Away on the horizon and a single of the same name already born into the world, one might imagine Calhoun as a fresh face ready to artistically blossom. But while those seeds are indeed set and in place, the last eight years have been something more equivalent to a Spartan without the spear for the Brooklyn-based musician.
Initially expected to release her first batch of music in 2008, frustrations with a producer left Calhoun album-less and bounced out of music. Left as a castaway burned by a downward twist of fate, she contemplated never coming back after such a setback. But, like a chapter unfinished and a verse left undone…. the art never truly stops. It merely waits for the writer to recapture their flame once the time is right again.
And so the bug returned for Calhoun (along with a helping hand from the Brooklyn musical community), and by 2014 she had begun writing for what would become the Take Me Away sessions. A journey, at last fulfilled.
Perhaps it’s the power of Calhoun’s artistic sensibilities as a songwriter or just those past experiences still looming raw, but this initially released single makes the strong emotions of her personal Dark Age seem as fragile as though they were yesterday. The first notes ring with the innocence of an arpeggio-ed lullaby, quickly turning to an effervescent confessional comparative to a more ragged St Vincent or Regina Spektor at her most breathlessly world-weary.
Calhoun can literally bring the motions of this song up to an angelic procession before plunging down to little more than a single vocal right on the cusp of cracking. Right on the fringe of falling apart. Drowning in the gentle drone of a synthesizer. It’s just the right mix of technology and fragility that brings to the mind the indie masterpiece of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. A modernistic art piece that still knows how to breathe on the weight of it’s impassioned human lungs.
And ultimately it’s that level of humanity that makes this track sparkle as much as it does. The notion that yes we may not know the reason why Calhoun sings so starkly of this emotional weight, but we can still understand her need to escape it. Her need to move by the demons biting just outside the periphery.
Being able to relate to others is one of the most human qualities we have. And when it comes to Calhoun, I’m ready to be taken away to the land this song promises. Let it be a journey we can all gladly take together.
Listen here:
http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/new-music/kohli-calhoun-take-me-away
On The Back Edge Of The Beat 
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