Kiss Me Deadly singer Jen Poland has drawn a timeline to show all the different musicians who’ve performed with her group over the past 15 or so years. But despite the rotating cast, Kiss Me Deadly has steadily played gigs and released new music over the course of that time
With a stable lineup now in place, the group has caught a serious second wind. Next month, it’ll release its latest album, Ship of Theseus, on vinyl. It’ll celebrate the release with a show on Saturday, April 25, at Brothers Lounge.
“I had started writing the songs through COVID, and then, John Scully became our full-time drummer, and as soon as that happened, our songs started to lock in,” says Poland recently over coffee at the Metropolitan, one of her favorite local coffee shops. “But then, I broke my hand, and I had to get an extra guitar player, and that’s how we ended up with Chris Frohring.”
She took that lineup down to Ohio University, where she teaches in the music production program, and recorded Ship of Theseus at the state-of-the-art studios located on campus.
“I engineered the album, and I’ve been mixing it,” she says. “It’s just now finally coming out on vinyl via [Cleveland’s] Gotta Groove. I had [Cleveland’s] Chris Keffer, who mastered our first album, master it for vinyl and digital. It’s a total expression of all my artistry.”
Poland also wrote and directed the music video for the single “Biosphere,” a breezy, ska-inspired number that came out of a songwriting session hosted by local singer-songwriter Brent Kirby.
“Making the music video was very challenging,” she says. “My saxophone player, Matt King, and I put all the work into it and Emerson Santuomo was my co-director. We ran multiple cameras through the whole set. It was in this abandoned observatory on the East side of Cleveland. It’s cool because it has all this graffiti all over the walls. I wanted the art of local artists in the video. We spray-painted ourselves to blend in, and I wanted this visual, colorful look at human art.”
As a child, Poland listened to the radio like any other kid growing up in Northeast Ohio. But music runs in her family, and she quickly began writing her own tunes while still in elementary school.
“My mom and uncles were folk singer-songwriters,” she says. “I had a guitar when I was a kid and because of them, I just thought I could write my own songs. When I was an adolescent, I loved hip-hop and rap. My first songs were bad because I was playing my guitar and rapping over it. It didn’t mix well. I had to find my sound. I finally found more of an indie rock vibe.”
She went on to front a band when she was at Kent in college and then taught herself to play electronic mandolin; she joined another band before setting out on her own with the Poland Invasion in 2008, a group that would morph into Kiss Me Deadly, which played its first show in 2009 at Around the Corner in Lakewood. That group featured local bassist-singer Evan Lieberman.
“My group has gone through all kinds of iterations,” she says, adding that “ship of Theseus,” a reference to the thought experiment about whether an object is the same after having all of its original components replaced, seemed like the perfect title for an album. “That’s why I called the album Ship of Theseus because it’s always been me and it’s always been my songs even though the other musicians have changed. Even though I’ve had different players and musicians, it’s still the original. I’ve also changed and gotten better and grown.”
While mixing Ship of Theseus, the group connected with Jim Ellis, who’s supported the Cleveland music scene for years as a journalist. He was interested in putting out new Kiss Me Deadly tunes on his CLE Records and will release a new Kiss Deadly album later this year (a CLE Records showcase takes place on June 27 at Brothers Lounge).
For the upcoming release party at Brothers Lounge, the group will play Ship of Theseus in its entirety.
“It’s just us that night,” says Poland. “After we play the entire record, we’ll play some other stuff, including songs from the next record just to tease people with what is coming out next.”
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