photo by Jason Lee Denton; photo courtesy of Skye Media

EP Review of Hadley Kennary – Crooked Roots

Show your best and leave ’em wanting more. Sometimes, an EP is a wise move, an ability to present your best, without a weak link. Now, I’m not suggesting that Hadley Kennary doesn’t have ten top-shelf songs that’d leave me just as excited about a full-length album – because I’ve only heard her EP – but I can tell you there’s no sign of weakness among the five tracks on Crooked Roots. The overarching style is pop, from a folky singer-songwriter starting point but with a broader, more mainstream reach.

image courtesy of Skye Media

Hadley kicks things off with what could easily be a hit single, “Orbit.” The somewhat stripped-down (though still musically rich) production makes the song a pleasant, moderately energetic listen and plants a seed that’ll have you singing along days later, days after you last even played the record. Catchy, rhythmic, with great pop sensibility. If you listen carefully, you can hear how, with different instrumentation, it could be a Taylor Swift-like pop-country hit with a tweak to the presentation or a more Katy Perry dance-pop hit a lusher music bed and more energetically pop delivery. Instead, the delivery is purely Hadley Kennary, heartfelt and thoughtful, though with perhaps the most pop sensibility of the songs on this EP. Certainly the most immediately catchy, as if you must have heard the song before, but you know it’s just your first listen.

“Crooked Roots” is slower, a little sonically darker, and exceptionally introspective, with a lyrical trend toward hopefulness. It’ll grow on you more slowly but just as deeply as the attention-grabbing disc-opener.

“Possession of Pain” is a poppier song with a lighter presentation, hinting at a danceable beat, though not exactly the right beat to be obvious to dance to, if you know what I mean. (In other words, great for the radio or an at-home/in-car listening sesh; no obvious way to move to it on a dancefloor.) For a song with this dance-ish energy, though, there’s an unusually insistent vocal line, stylistically a bit like P!nk, but with a softer touch.

photo by Jason Lee Denton; photo courtesy of Skye Media

“Everything Hurts” is another of those mid-tempo dance-pop songs – again, the kind of pop music with drums and synth suggesting maybe a dance number… until you try to dance to it and discover it’s maybe just barely too slow to dance to. I’ll retract that a little in this case; I’ve actually been able to dance to “Everything Hurts,” which you would, unfortunately, know if you ever peered through my window while I was listening to it.

Hadley closes out her EP with “Love Like That,” a singer-songwriter pop number that elicits a wistfully, melancholically positive portfolio of emotions.

The song that pulled me in was “Orbit,” with its obvious hit potential and quick catchiness, so definitely make that your first listen, but the rest of the album, quite quickly, grew on me until the entire collection became a favorite segment of my music review queue. So yeah, give these songs a try; they’re exceptionally well-written, so if it’s your musical style, you’ll dig ’em.

More Recently

Hadley is plugging her single “Friends Forever” with Jordan Lindley.

Looking Ahead

The “tour” page of Hadley’s website doesn’t list any upcoming dates, but that’s where you’ll find ’em. And you can read updates about her musical career here on Hadley’s Facebook page or on her Instagram page.