Featured Artist

Melinda Kingsley - Singer, Guitar
Katie Bitner - Bass
Becca Mashburn - Drums
Grace Buford - Singer, Guitar, Piano

The Melinda Kingsley Band exemplifies an amazing presence on stage. With Melinda Kingsley on lead vocals and guitar, Katie Bitner on bass, Becca Mashburn on drums, and Grace Buford on vocals, guitar, and piano together they embody a fullness of sound that ranges from alternative to folk rock to southern rock. Melinda shares how the band developed since 2006 “This is the fourth incarnation of the band with Grace being involved… I love this story. Katie is my next door neighbor and a good friend. I said ‘I want to start a band, get a bass.’ She never touched a bass, never touched a guitar, nothing. Everything that she learned was through the band. We had our first gig two weeks after she got her bass. She was extremely panicked. We did like five songs together, and I did three solo. It was a funny thing with the first drummer [as well]. We knew a girl that liked drums; she never played them, but she wanted to try so I said ‘Get a drum set.’ She went and got a drum set and that was the first incarnation of the band. We did that for like six months and then the drummer moved on and we picked up another drummer and his name is Michael Guss. He’s extremely talented and accomplished as far as drums and music goes. As it goes with musicians, we kept him for about six months and he had to take on full-time work and wasn’t able to have time for the band anymore so we lost him. Then we picked up Becca after that and then recently Grace... Becca’s been in the band about seven or eight months and then Grace we picked up in the past two months. We’ve got the sound with the addition of Grace that I wanted that I’ve been trying to get but didn’t exactly know how to do it. Grace is awesome because she’s versatile. Not only is she vocally talented and plays guitar, keyboard, and harmonica, she’s like a jack of all trades with music. She also comes at it from a standpoint of someone who works with song structure so she brings her own stuff to it. She knows as many different harmonies as you can think of to put into a certain place. She knows the right ones and knows where it goes and that’s because she is a songwriter and a really wonderful songwriter in her own right. Same thing with guitar and keyboard because she does that on her own, and is accomplished at it, I feel that she’s able to bring just the right thing in…I know the sound that I’m looking for now. It took getting there to know what I wanted.”

The Melinda Kingsley Band has the sound Melinda has been working towards. But how did she get here? When did her passion for music begin? Melinda shares her story. “I think my music started really with my dad because my dad plays a little guitar and he sings. Some of my fondest memories with my dad of being little were him playing guitar and singing. His grandparents came off the boat from Ireland so he sang a lot of folk songs and Irish folk songs and ballads. So that’s kind of what I grew up on. I remember when I was in like second grade I think or maybe first, I remember telling my mom that I wanted to be a singer when I grew up. So it started early… I was like six so I imagine she had the same reaction when I told her I wanted to be a cowboy” Melinda laughed. “I did sing in church and travel around to churches to sing when I was a teenager probably from about when I was twelve until about when I was fifteen so they were very supportive with that and drove me around and all that fun stuff.”

After weighing her options, cowboy or singer, Melinda shares how she decided to pursue singing, “I was better at singing than I was at rustling cattle is really what it came down to. It was just – I don’t know - talent. I had the talent… it was going to be some kind of art. I used to draw and all that kind of stuff as a kid but I had the talent for singing. So everything kind of developed out of that to be honest. It was just luck of the draw.”

“I’m from Chattanooga [Tennessee]. I grew up there. I actually lived in Rossville which is right at the Tennessee border but anything you wanted to do, you had to go to Chattanooga. So I always get homesick for the people and not just like any particular people, like ‘the people’ because we talk in a way and understand each other in a way you can recognize somebody’s from where you’re from. And I miss that at times… Primarily I moved to Atlanta because I’m a lesbian and the gay scene is not so much in like Chattanooga. It’s not even so much the scene; it’s like being able to comfortable in your own skin… I did what every other gay person in the south did; we ran from our small towns and went to the big city. So it’s more comfortable. But other than that I miss the geography, I miss the people. I miss the fall. I miss a lot about it.”

While in the midst of pursuing her music career, Melinda also began writing her own songs. “When I was about seventeen, I wrote my first song. I was in a cover band at the time. I’ve always dabbled in all kinds of art, drawing - not so much anymore - but I write poetry and then I had the singing thing. It all just seemed to coalesce into one thing so I guess the writing came from that and God knows I like to talk. I love to talk about how I feel about things so that’s what I do.” For Melinda, it’s about making a connection with her fans by sharing her stories whether they are upbeat or dark stories to tell. “It feels like the most important thing. I think that’s how a lot of the times artists get into trouble. In trouble in this way, is that you start focusing on more of what you think people want to hear instead of what you have to say. So I think as long as you stick with that, you’re in a good spot. So that’s my plan, is to stay there… Writers have a way of saying it…‘Write what you know.’ It’s the same kind of thing. Stick with who you are. Write what you know because that’s the only way really to be authentic… Now the top forty on the radio is going to contradict what I’m about to say… but I do think, especially in the genre of music that I’m in, people can feel authenticity, and they can feel someone being inauthentic. Sometimes I will listen to an artist and kind of feel like I’m being duped, so to me that’s an integral part of it.”

Melinda’s life experiences and the people around her inspire her music and songwriting. What influences her style of writing? “Hmm… Ok. Ready?” Melinda ponders before explaining her style, “As a songwriter – and this is going to sound extremely pretentious I’m just going to tell you now - I try to get out of the way like I think that poets and prophets use the same language. It’s like the language of dreams as well. I think it’s my job as a writer to get out of the way and let that stuff out. Let that stuff come through and just be a conduit. So a lot of the time I write songs that I’m not even sure what they are about at the time and I’ll come back later and be able to look at what was happening in my life and go ‘Oh, I was processing all that.’” Melinda’s first song, ‘Shadow Box’ is one she states will never see the light of day; it reflected what she was going through when she was seventeen. Melinda continues “I don’t think I was happy so much. I bet it was my confusion and emotional turbulence and I just processed it through music… I just think that especially with art, I don’t know that you’re doing your job as an artist if you come to the table with any more than a rough sketch of where you’re going because you get in the way too much - is my feeling. It’s more like I try to write about images and about feelings and then my job as an editor later is to come back and go this line works better here or it would be better to says this this way. But as far as the beginning process, it’s just kind of getting the paint on the wall and then detailing it up later.”

Since dabbling in songwriting, Melinda recorded a solo album in 2004 called ‘Following Stars’ where she shares several songs of upbeat tales to somber ballads. Melinda tells the stories behind some of the songs. She shares that “You Were Mine” was inspired by a wedding, “I went to a wedding of a friend’s – actually it was my girlfriend’s friend that was getting married. This person stood up at this wedding and gave this completely inappropriate speech about one of the people that was getting married. They were saying things like ‘I let you get away’, things that you would never ever ever say at a wedding. So I got to thinking about what they had said which was basically ‘you were mine and I’m letting you know that I screwed up.’ So it was really just kind of about that person that stood up and I just tried to write it from their perspective. But the chorus kind of is removed almost from my point of view because I find that particularly the lines about ‘the more you think about forgetting, the more memories you make’ is that things that have bothered me the most or that I’ve thought about the most, it’s like they take on a history and a life of their own. It really has nothing to do with the original person or the original event. It became something else so that there’s little resemblance to what really happen.”

“’Connie Row’” Melinda explains, “is about my momma. Everything in that song happened with the exception that she doesn’t love Minnesota or whatever I said. It just seemed like it fit there but everything else in that song happened. My momma’s name is Linda Lou so it’s the same name structure. I was listening to a song on the radio - because I do this a lot - and I thought that they used the name Connie Row and that’s not even close to what they said. But in my head, that’s what they said and so I’m like ‘That’s a great name!’ and when I realized that’s not what they said and so I stole it.” Melinda shares her inspiration for ‘Connie Row’. “My mom is one of those people that I feel like she did better for others in her life than what was done for her. I know that I’ve had many, many, many conflicts with my mother. I actually moved out when I was seventeen because I couldn’t live in my house anymore. But the more I learned about my mother and learned about her life, the easier it was to become friends, to make a transition from mother/daughter to friends. She still is in the mother role. I’m not one of those people that just thinks you’re best friends…, but I still see her as a mom and see her as an individual as well. Learning her history was able to make me see her that way…others have said it better than me, but there’s that saying that you never know until you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. It’s the same thing. It’s how we grow, it’s how we learn sympathy and empathy is by learning about other people. There’s no new emotion under the sun. There’s no new feeling under the sun. If I’ve felt it, someone else has felt it.”

“Leave it alone” is about a forbidden love. Melinda shares “That was about an affair with a married person. ‘Leave it alone’ is the moral of the story. It was also knowing that I knew better at the time but I did it anyway. There’s this quote by Neil Gaiman. I have my repertoire of quotes and I love them each but this one in particular ‘Back in the traps of our own design…pretending amazement all the while’. Most of the time, people do know what they’re doing but the trouble of lying is that you’re not really lying to someone else, you are lying to you.”

“If” Melinda explains, “That was a relationship ending. Actually it was right after a break up; what I would call my definitive break up... It’s funny how changing one thing can change a course of events. I guess I was thinking about that. If I were different, or if this would have been different. It’s running through all those ‘if’s’ in your head. I put a line in there about summer ‘every summer I remember about…’ when I talk about this guy named John… because his name was John Summerour, so I tried to play the summer as kind of the nod… The person I wrote that song in response to we broke up over circumstances that neither one of us had any control over. It was the point in my life when I learned my whole worldview changed in this way, is that to a certain point in my life I believed that love covers a multitude of sin, and in the end if you love someone, then everything will turn out ok. And that’s not true. It was not only a loss of a person but it was a loss of my world view because the situation was such that neither one of us could control the circumstances. We still loved each other very much but it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Following Stars” closes with “Starboard.” Melinda shared enthusiastically “It’s totally in the spirit of those ballads [folk songs] that I grew up on. I grew up on those traditional folk songs, Irish and American folk songs and nothing good ever happens in those things. I have to write a song because I think not only was it my first exposure to music, I think it also curved my view on some things. Yeah, that song was totally a nod to those ballads that I grew up on.”

The Melinda Kingsley Band has a demo CD of two songs “Cotton Mouth” and “Echo”. “Cotton Mouth” was the first recording as a band. “That I think is my best song.” Melinda explains. “It’s at least my signature song. It was the first thing we recorded and I not only had the idea of recording it in my head for a long time so I kind of knew what I wanted to do with it, but also the idea, I felt like, it kind of peculated since my youth. It was an attempt to explain our people [of the south] especially from the area that I grew up in…” When listening to “Cotton Mouth”, a rattle gave the sound effect for a snake, “Now granted,” Melinda explains “it’s not a cotton mouth because a cotton mouth is a water moccasin, that’s what we called it when we were growing up, but it was the only way we could incorporate snake into the music to where it would be identifiable so we used the rattle even though it doesn’t have one. It comes up in my head as like the snake handling churches. I knew people that went to them. We were Pentecostal growing up. Then I remember playing softball and back behind the fields where we used to play there was a creek and there was an old abandoned house. It was like it was sitting in the middle of the woods. It had been there so long that there was no path to it. There was no drive to it. We used to go back and explore the house that was rotting. You had to cross this creek and a lot of times we would go back to cross the creek, you would have to watch for water moccasins because a lot of times you would see them down there. It didn’t seem scary as a kid. I don’t know. I guess you have that thing where you think you’re invincible. Somehow it encapsulates my feelings about the south is that the feeling of watching. It’s thrilling and scary and awe inspiring all at the same time just seeing that. It’s like you can’t see them until they’re up on you. It’s kind of how I see not only the south but the people of the south are that that’s kind of how we lived… Not that we’re not capable but we’re not long term planners, we’re just doing day by day… So it seemed appropriate because we’re just kind of dealing with what’s coming next. It’s like you don’t see things until they’re up on you. That’s a real abstract way to talk about it but that’s how it feels.”… I say ‘The devil beats our wives’ that comes to my mind. My grandmother used to say that and she would always talk about it when the sun was shining and it was raining… So I just tried to put everything, every experience, every thing that I associated with being southern in that song. That is one of my favorites.”

“Echo” I think is technically the best song that I’ve ever written.” Melinda shares, “Now ‘Cottonmouth’ is my signature and is probably my favorite child but as far as song structure and the effectiveness of a metaphor and carrying it out in the right way to me that’s my best effort of that is that song.”

Check out live performances by The Melinda Kingsley Band in the Georgia and Tennessee areas as they bring a full sound of alternative, folk rock, and southern rock. Majority of their songs are originals with some cover songs in the mix.

Keep on rockin’, Melinda Kingsley Band!