Premiere: Kennedy braves funkadelic pop storm with new EP, ‘Jimmy Jett’
Pop-rock producer and songwriter readies his new EP.
To break out in commercial pop music is to slay a nearly unconquerable dragon. Singers, songwriters and musicians suit up in a shimmering armor of determination, high expectations and gleeful optimism. They confront a seemingly impenetrable industry and a cavalcade of record label executives in order to fulfill an artistic destiny so great, they can’t imagine any other option. Last month, Jack Kennedy (known onstage as simply Kennedy) unlocked a brand new gold single, having written and produced BØRNS’ “10,000 Emerald Pools,” a deep-water love song in soft-rock glory from 2015’s Dopamine. Now, leveling up on his own craft, Kennedy readies his equally groovy new EP, a four-track set called Jimmy Jett.
The titular cut bursts from the seams right from the outset, alighting on a funkadelic display of badassery and loose-lipped swagger. “Jimmy Jett is a hair stylist in London. He stole my girlfriend, and initially, I was very upset. But then I realized he was just a badass, and I was out of my depth,” Kennedy explains to B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the EP in-full today ahead of its Friday (December 7) street date. His vocal is tangy with the classic vigor of ’80s David Bowie, the ignition oozing with overly confident double-dipped vision. “He’s party in the back / He’s business in the front / He’ll take you all the way / He’ll steal your credit card,” he sings, romanticizing his heartache into a disco-club banger.
Kennedy then eyes a swampy, lightning-zapped charmer on his stolen lover. With “The Creature,” a reference to one of many aliases for Frankenstein’s monster, he unleashes a blood-curdling scream. “It’s alive!” he yowls in between thunder claps twisting across a backdrop of church organ and dusty electric guitar, which worms its way in film noir style underneath the fabric. “I got one foot out the door and one in the grave,” he confesses of his transfixed gazed, despite her being awe-struck by Jimmy Jett and slipping from his clammy grasp. “She was emotionally unavailable, and I was super needy…which is always a winning combination,” he says.
Recorded between Hackney, London and Los Angeles’ Highland Park, the extended play pops and fizzes in splashy cannonballs. “Quicksand,” echoing the endearing, heart-pounding naivety of his younger days, finds Kennedy reengaging with his 16-year-old self and dressing up an idealistic future as a grown-up. “I think it was about what we imagined” of adult relationships, he concedes, kissing each lyric with an addictive luminosity. “We were right.” Then, bookending the record, “The 405” unthreads a boozy and buzzed tale along the 101 Freeway and “signing away my publishing rights during a hot tub party,” he says, his cheeks flushed and the high reddening his eye sockets. “Don’t sue me from your jacuzzi,” he sings, with a smirk and a wink.
Kennedy’s Jimmy Jett EP, dazzling in the glow of one million stars, is the kind of career-cementing release that busts down doors. His time is now. Stage set, we’re ready for his next batch of trickery.
Listen below:
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