K&F presents

Hello Emerson from Ohio play subtle, narrative and somehow all-encompassing indie folk in the Midwestern songwriting tradition between The Mountain Goats, Bright Eyes and Sufjan Stevens, whom they increasingly decorate in chamber music. The singer-songwriter of the band is Sam Bodary. He has studied literature at Ohio State University and one of his parade disciplines is to isolate tiny droplets from the wildly bubbling fire hose of life and zoom in to make something bigger clear and reflect.

“To Keep Him Here” tells the very personal story of an accident of the father of Sam Bodary. He had stopped to help a few people clear a fallen tree on a highway. Without memory, he finds himself in an intensive care unit with a serious head injury. This is followed by a protracted convalescence phase in the circle of the family. Long uncertain to what extent personality, physical and mental abilities will return. It was one of those sad events, without real cause, without guilty parties and without meaning, that suddenly gave rise to the fierce arbitrariness of the

It is a life that is always repressed. Thank goodness, this is immediately anticipated, Bodary’s father has survived the injury and today enjoys good health again. “To Keep Him Here” has become an album for all those who have received such a call from the hospital before and for everyone else who will inevitably find themselves in a similar situation with a close person.

What Hello Emerson is doing here is actually a highly artificial, artistic process. They summarize the events of a few days in songs and report them linearly in the course of the album. Making it all seem so organic, light and musical is one of the many amazing achievements of this album. From song to song, the story unfolds, individual situations, spaces, thoughts and reactions of the participants are illuminated.

Again and again, short interludes based on passages from an interview Bodary conducted with his father for NPR StoryCorps to shed light on the timing and the way in which the event was handled.

On “To Keep Him Here” there are lines that bring tears to your eyes (lead him to the toilet | for the first time in my life | white knuckles grip my shoulders like | a theme park safety bar (“To Keep Him Here”), grim humor, everyday observations about orphaned furniture pieces (“Couch”) and in between the recurring attempt of the songwriter to find a meaning or a lesson in all the emotional chaos.

songs won’t keep you here when it’s your time to go but they can stand here in your place and keep some of your memories safe

(“Church”)

While her second album “How to Cook Everything” from 2020 was more of a collaborative product of 50 local musicians in her hometown of Columbus, “To Keep Him Here” was concise. The band of the album consists of singer and guitarist Bodary, drummer and arranger Dan Seibert and Jack Doran on Keys and Synths, complemented by bassist Benjamin Ahlteen and the rather uniquely cast chamber music quartet Knisely (Evan Lynch – clarinet, Helen Cates – violin, Shine Robison – piano, Zach Koors – vibraphon).