The Posies’ Ken Stringfellow shares a full life with you via his music
by Adam McKibbin
Ken Stringfellow gets around. When he’s not touring and playing as a sometime-member of R.E.M. or Big Star or the Minus 5, and when he’s not resurrecting the Posies with fellow founding member Jon Auer, Stringfellow also has made time for a vibrant solo career. More recently, he’s also made time to become a husband, then a father. And, oh yes, in his spare time, he likes to travel.
Fittingly, the liner notes for Stringfellow’s new album, Soft Commands, include not just where each track was recorded, but where each track was written. We get visions, then, of the singer holed up in the Roosevelt Hotel here in Hollywood (“Known Diamond”) and inspired in Athens, in Senegal, and at his dual homes (Seattle and Paris).
“I wanted to give a little bit of glimpse as to how much movement there has been in my life,” Stringfellow says. “I think that gives me the ability to look at my life and other people’s lives from a number of different perspectives.”
“Being in Africa was really enlightening,” he continues. “We’re the same but different, different but the same. Especially among musicians, there’s so much common ground that the cultural differences between the States and Senegal didn’t really matter. They had a lot of the same reasons for writing and a lot of the same dreams about music and dreams about what they wanted to accomplish as people as I did.”