"Music is poetry; even instrumental music has some meaning. Might not have semantic meaning, but has meaning."

Kellen Murphy is an indie folk artist from Anacortes, Washington. He is now majoring in English with an emphasis in creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. He has been writing songs since 2021, and he's currently playing shows with The Kellen Murphy Band and Jennifer What.

I spoke with Kellen before his November 3rd show at the Underground Coffeehouse in the Viking Union building at WWU. We discussed his new record, which will be out early next year, his unexpected horror story, and his last album, Why Don't You Dance?

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Elliot Tercero: Tell me about your last album, Why Don't You Dance? How did it come about?

Kellen Murphy: I started recording it when I lived in the dorms at Higginson Hall in May of 2025. I recorded a little bit of it back then, most notably "The Fixer" and "Rinse and Repeat", and then I sat on that for a while, and I didn't do anything with the songs. Then the school year started, and I was living in a house, and so I guess I would have started it in April, and then I finished it in November; I want to say like the 10th or so of that year. And I just recorded it all at home. And it was a lot of fun. I wrote a lot of the songs in bursts. I write a lot of my lyrics while I'm at work just because it's boring and I need to be doing something. I wrote "Second Death", "Photos", "Frames", "That's the Day", "What If?", "Conforming", "Possum Song", "Beauty of the Moon", and "I Can't Write Love Songs" within a 20-minute span at work. That's like most of the album. When I write lyrics, I don't think of the melodies or anything. I just write the words, and then I come up with whatever I have to do to make it work in a musical sense after the fact. Which I've been told is strange. So, do with that what you will.

ET: I know a few folks like that. I'm the total opposite. I gotta do the song first. Words will come, and melody, total afterthought.

KM: That's crazy. Every time I write a song where I start with a musical idea and I record that, recording vocals on top of it is always like the bane of my existence. I can't do it. Very few of my songs are like that.

ET: Speaking of songs, I heard that Why Don't You Dance? is available on vinyl long-play disc.

KM: Yeah, on Elastic Stage. You can get a copy of it, and it sounds pretty good. 


ET: What do you think a listener would get from the vinyl record experience that they wouldn't get from just listening to the album off of Bandcamp or streaming?

KM: Well, I think that owning something is way better than streaming it just in terms of integrity and peace of mind. But I think there's a sense of novelty to playing physical media, you know, the more resistance you have, the more difficult your access is to that music,
it kind of feels more fun. It's like, oh, I don't just have to hit play. I have to take this disc out and put the needle on. If we're talking in the technical sense, firstly, they're actually divided into side A and side B, how I wanted them to be, because it does have an exact side A and side B in my mind, but on a CD, you can't do that. Also, the transition from Photos into Frames is smoother on the vinyl.

ET: The Kellen Murphy band is playing tonight. Tell me about them.

KM: I wanted to start it way back in the summer of '24, and I got Braden Kruger, who was in The Lonely Forest and also taught me how to play the drums, to agree to drum on it. And that was gonna be fun. I was talking with David Zhang at The Karate Church to put together an anniversary show for Staying In, which would have been in... we would have based it off of the streaming release, which was in early September, but that just kind of fell through, and I didn't really do anything with it for a while. And then last year, I became pretty good friends with Nick Wandling, who is the GOAT and is a really good bass clarinetist, bass player, and keyboard player, and he was like, we should just do it. So I got Sean Dyer to play bass, but Sean was always gonna play bass for me. He was down from the get-go. And then I asked my friend Nathalie Borrero-Celis, who plays drums, and she agreed. And we played two shows at the beginning of this year before the end of the school year, and both of them went pretty well, and then we couldn't do it over the summer because Natalie was in her hometown. And then when we came back, Nick had moved out of Bellingham. So I asked another friend, Sophia Chiellini, who's an extremely talented jazz guitarist whom I've played with a fair bit in Jazz Combo at Western. And I asked her if she'd be interested in playing, or actually, no, I had Natalie ask her by proxy because they're roommates, and for whatever reason, she agreed to it. And now we're here. It's been a lot of fun. Everyone seems to like my songs, which is always surprising to me, but it's a lot of fun.

ET: I read somewhere that you're from Anacortes, but are now based in Bellingham. How has this shaped you as an artist?

KM: I have a general disdain for much of Anacortes. Mostly in regard to the sort of, I don't know... every small town kind of feels like the adults never grew up, especially the adults that live there and grew up there and never moved out. There's generally an air of, like, a lot of people kind of make everything into a popularity contest, which is stupid in the real world. But do you know what I mean? With Anacortes? Everything turns out that way. 
Although I do love that town. I think that it has good bones. I think that it has a lot of really spectacular things that a lot of other places don't really, both in terms of nature and also, like, the arts. And also just being the gateway to the San Juans is so impactful on my outlook now. I don't know how, but always having access to just far-off, distant lands and islands and shit. I actually wrote a new song that's going to be the closer on my next album where I talk about kind of being from Anacortes a little bit. I don't talk very much about it, but I talk a little bit about it. But I think, especially the music that I was writing when I was in Anacortes, there are only two albums that were recorded there. They were the first two. And everything else is kind of outside of that bubble, and I think just kind of being in any place, and then kind of existing outside of that space, and feeling how you change, and how your environment has changed, is... I don't know how it's impacted my songwriting. I couldn't tell you exactly how, but I'm sure that it has, I mean, just like how everything goes. I'm sure that moving into a new house in February impacted my songwriting in some way, you know? I think everything contributes.

ET: You're also a writer and a poet. How does your process of writing the non-music stuff mesh with the songwriting, and how do they differ?

KM: I don't write a lot of poetry. Sometimes when I write poetry, I'm like, this should be just a poem; it shouldn't be a song, and then it works really well as a song. "Hurt Me" is an example. "Hurt Me" wasn't originally intended to be a song at all. It's nice because so many literary journals that take submissions have started to take musical submissions as of late, and I think that's really nice because, in some ways, music is poetry; even instrumental music has some meaning. Might not have semantic meaning, but has meaning. But in terms of creative writing endeavors, I usually write short stories, and sometimes my songs are more short story-esque, where I just kind of ramble for a good while. Like "Ghosts of Halloween". I kind of just talk for eight minutes, and that's the song. I also just do them for different reasons, but I'm more used to songwriting. So nine times out of ten, if I'm gonna write for a creative outlet, it's going to be a song, and that remaining 10 percent is, like, anything other than a song, and within that 10 percent, it probably will end up being a song or related to a song at some point, but I really like writing flash fiction that's very speculative. I've been told that I write horror. I won a horror contest at Western for a piece that I didn't even know was scary until someone told me it was.

ET: You're working on a previously mentioned new record. What can you tell us about it?

KM: I can tell you everything about it. It's called Self-Titled. Working on getting a cover photo shot by my friend Jess Brown. We were gonna do it last week, but there were some difficulties. But we know where we're gonna go now. We know where the shoot's gonna be. We just need to do it. The title track is the closing track. Which is also called "Self-Titled". Tonight, I'm gonna be playing two songs that are on that new one that will probably be out in like January or something. Usually, mid-November is my time. Both Why Don't You Dance? and Evergreen New Moon were finished around the same day, a year apart, on November 10th or so, but I'm gonna give myself more time just because a couple of the songs really need drums on them, and recording drums is such a pain. I just need to flesh them out and then do dedicated drum days, but there are basic tracks for 10 songs. There are vocals and guitar at least on 10 whole songs, and I'm thinking of adding an 11th one, though I might just save it for another thing because it's really similar to one of the songs on the album. But yeah, there are 10 songs. It should be around 40 minutes again. It's kind of a mishmash because in the summer, I recorded a bunch of full-band songs where I'm playing all the instruments, and then I recorded some acoustic ones that are just vocals and guitar, and while I want to flesh out the vocals and guitar a little bit more, every song isn't going to be a full rock song. So the album isn't gonna be necessarily very homogeneous, which I think is fine. I don't see any problems with that. I have two songs ready and mixed and done that will not be on the album and will be a double A-side single released sometime after the album. Because they just don't fit, and they're weird and loud.

ET: Like punk rock?

KM: No, they're not punk. But they have weird time signatures, and they're much more like a rock band wrote them. Which I don't think I don't think I'm very... I wouldn't say that I'm not good at it, but it happens to me less. This is not something I do as often.

ET: What is one thing you'd want new listeners to know about you and your craft?

KM: Listen, if you want to like my music, listen in reverse chronological order. Because I feel like once you already enjoy Why Don't You Dance? You might find something in Staying In. But you can't just, you can't just go there. Have you heard the redacted first album that exists on Bandcamp?

ET: I have not heard the redacted first album that exists on Bandcamp. I think the farthest I've gone is Senioritis.

KM: Staying In is actually not bad. It's not very bad. It's very much like early Car Seat Headrest, like lo-fi rock, but it's not bad. It's pretty rough. I didn't know what an EQ was yet. It's not mastered. Just like, period. Like Car Seat Headrest, my GOAT. Put a limiter on the master and call it good. Which is honestly what I still do.

ET: Any local artists you'd like to shout out?

KM: I'd like to shout out, well, I'd like to talk about Jennifer What because we have a new album coming out. Should be out in December. Nine new songs, experimental rock with a lot of folk influence. Not what you would typically expect from that band.

ET: Is it like the new single?

KM: It's like the new single, but it also has a lot of parts that are really weird and out there. It was finished being mastered as of yesterday. Or the last couple of days, I don't know. Gabe Sodl just sent me the files yesterday. But it's really good. Out of all of the music that I've ever made, it is the project that I'm the most proud of being a part of. But in terms of bands that aren't me, I'd like to shout out Rootbeer, because he's the GOAT, and he's doing this show with me tonight, and he's just a nice dude. Some local bands that I really aspire to write like, and not necessarily sound like, but that I really think are great fixtures in the Bellingham scene would be, like, Pleader is great. Bellflower is great. Dollarbird, all those guys. I really like Lolo Wawa's stuff, if you've heard of her. She's one of the singers in Bellflower, but she performs solo under the name Lolo Wawa, and her stuff's great. Heron Drive. They're great. They're fun. Good old Jesse Hawkins. I'm actually producing his new album, too. Yeah, we've got two or three songs tracked. It's been slow because we've both been so busy, but it'll probably be done sometime next year.

ET: What are five records in your rotation currently?

KM: So, I don't have streaming services. I only use Bandcamp, and I burn my CDs onto VLC Media Player. Currently, or like all time?

ET: Either.

KM: If I do all time, can I just do a top ten?

ET: Yes.

KM: Okay, sweet. I'll put the more current ones at the top of the top ten. The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That album clicked for me about six months ago, and I get it now, and it's a great time. I always liked it, but I never understood why some people put it at the top of their list. It's not my personal favorite Beatles album, but I get it. get it a lot more now. It's rad. I would say Night Palace by Mount Eerie. I would say Montclair, which is a live album by Pinegrove. That's three. I would say Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter. How to Leave Town by Car Seat Headrest is always in my rotation. As of recently, Holding by Hailaker. If you've not heard of this band, I wouldn't doubt it, but they're so good. They're so, so good. They're very, like, indie rock singer-songwriter... really well-arranged pop songs. I would really check out Holding. It's a great album. My friend Garrett recommended it to me. Mount Eerie by The Microphones, best album of all time. No notes. HerNameWasPrincess, HerNameWasPrincess, best album of all time. Ants From Up There, by Black Country, New Road. That album has always been something that I aspire to write like, and then I guess for my number ten spot, I will put Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at "The Club" by Cannonball Adderley Quintet.

You can listen to Kellen Murphy at https://kellenmurphy.bandcamp.com.

You can read Kellen's unexpected short horror story at https://jeopardy.wwu.edu/expansions-on-an-idiom.