I first stumbled across Kelly Hogan in 1990. The last few weeks of my college radio career were flying past, and I'd just encountered the Jody Grind's debut LP, One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure. The Atlanta-based band's mixture of jazz, country, rock and just-plain-out-there music caught my fancy, as did their captivating singer. A few years later, the more challenging Lefty's Deceiver hit the streets, furthering the band's buzz...but due to the tragic van accident death of two members, the Jody Grind missed their shot at household name status.

Eight or nine years later, I discovered that Splendid's press contact at Bloodshot Records was none other than Kelly Hogan, transplanted to Chicago. Despite a flair for press releases, she wasn't long for the world of PR. Unable to stay away from the microphone, Hogan's vocal abilities moved her from Bloodshot's staff to their talent roster. Backed by the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, she released Beneath the Country Underdog early this year, re-igniting the near-universal critical acclaim the Jody Grind had inspired.

Forget any genre tags; Hogan's a stunning vocalist, period. But don't take my word for it -- catch her live when you can. And for all you UK readers, Kelly will be in England for a week in early September. Check out the dates here, and if you can, tell her you read about her in Splendid. We love it when you do that.

Splendid: I remember hearing somewhere that you used to sell airplanes.

Hogan: Yeah, I worked in the sales department of Hangar One, Inc., and they sold Beechcraft airplanes. It was all because of Julie, the sales secretary, who was pregnant... It's a long story. But yeah, I went to work at this place... It's a really long story, actually. My dad was a pilot for the police force -- he was a career policeman -- and my stepmom ran the charter department at Hangar One. My brother is a pilot too, and now he sells Beechcraft. After I worked for a veterinarian, I got a job at Hangar One at the front desk -- you know, where the pilots come in and say "I need 200 gallons of jet-A for 2354-Papa" and then you get on the intercom... It was great. And they had all the ramp guys -- I wanted to be one of those guys that did this -- (she mimes the actions of one of those guys who guides the plane out onto the runway) -- but it was like this whole male thing.

Splendid: Yeah, don't you need a Master's degree for that?

Hogan: I don't know, something. But they'd work on the ramp, and they'd drive the tugs. But we used to get drunk on Michelob Lite and drive the tugs around. Not on the runway...but at night. I was very young. So anyway, I was working on the fuel/rent-a-car desk. That's where I got to meet Jesse Jackson, and I got to meet all the wrestlers before wrestling got big, like Dusty Rhodes and Rick Flair, because they used to fly out of our...deal. It's called an FBO -- way too much information for you, I know. But anyway, the sales secretary, Julie, got pregnant, and I was drafted to fill in for her while she was gone. Then she decided not to come back -- she was supposed to just be gone for a month, but after her baby she didn't want to come back. And I made the mistake of doing a really good job, and the sales guy was like "I'm not letting you go, ever!" So I ended up being a sales assistant for him, which meant no commission but I got to type up invoices for sales of planes...$1,786,423.47, and I'd be like "Can't they round it up?" When it gets over a million dollars, round it up...

But I got to go flying a lot. But I wanted to be in a band really bad, and I wasn't meeting anybody who played guitar at the airport, so I quit. That was the last time I had health insurance until just six months ago. And so my poor mother was like "Oh my god..." That was my last "pantyhose job", as I call it. I tried to get fired, but the sales manager liked me. I used to wear fishnets to work, I dyed my hair blue, all this stuff...he didn't care. I was a good sales assistant. But I wasn't driven. Sales don't drive me. So I quit, and I went to work at a record store. I figured maybe if I was working at a record store I'd find somebody to be in a band. And it worked that way -- within three months I met Bill Taft and we started playing together, and the Jody Grind was formed right after that. Within a nine-month period. It actually worked. I was poor -- I didn't have a place to live. I was couch-surfing, but I was in a band.

Splendid: And couch-surfing helps establish your credibility, too.

Hogan: I guess. It sucked dingers at the time, but it was okay. So yes, I did sell aircraft.

Splendid: It just seemed to me like "airplane sales" was a really cool thing to be able to stick in your bio.

Hogan: Yeah, it was right after "veterinary technician" -- aircraft sales assistant, and then it went to record store employee, house painter, burrito maker...what else have I done? Nanny... Bloodshot publicist. Nothing makes career sense...and look at me now.

Splendid: Yeah, I've read short versions of the story, but how'd you end up in the Bloodshot publicist job?

Hogan: Totally a fluke. I moved in with my boyfriend at the time, who was friends with Rob Miller at Bloodshot, and Rob was one of the people that my boyfriend at the time duped into helping us move, and he was humping my record crates up the stairs and looking down at them saying "I'm breaking my spine for the Bangles?!" So I met Rob Miller that way. I just wanted to move here and not do anything with music. I wanted to pay off my credit cards and blah blah blah, and just sort of shut up for a while and see if I could do something else. Eric Babcock had just left Bloodshot and they were in the lurch, sort of, and they needed somebody really bad -- they had all these releases coming out. I had never really done publicity officially -- I'd done it for my own bands, just on the seat-of-the-pants level, so Rob was desperate, obviously, to ask me to do that job. He asked Nan, and she said okay, so I was like "alright". Because I didn't really know that much about Bloodshot... I liked some of their stuff. So it was just a fluke. But I liked them, personally, and I came to love Bloodshot as one of my own. That's how.

Splendid: They definitely seem like one of those "families" where once you're in, you're never really out.

Hogan: I've got the taint on me, I know. I've got the hoofmark or whatever. It was timing and desperation. Desperate measures.

Splendid: Did you enjoy the work?

Hogan: I enjoyed the writing. I liked writing press releases, and I liked talking to certain writers, and I made a lot of great friends -- a lot of good writer folks. I always seem to have been dating writers, or whatever, my whole life. I don't know. So I felt at home calling and talking to writers on the phone. About sixty per cent of them are total dorks, but I felt bad -- I was making calls I didn't want to make to people who didn't want to get my calls, but those were our jobs. So the people you'd talk to who were really nice, or where you found a common interest, were really a breath of fresh air. I mean, you make a million calls a day and you mostly just get machines...

Splendid: Kind of like very specific telemarketing.

Hogan: So that was exhausting. But I liked the writing, and I liked the people, and I liked feeling like I was doing some good, because I know what it's like to be in a band and playing dookie-butt town on a Tuesday and not having anything about you in the paper, and not having any posters there, or whatever. But then it became all this pressure -- all these bands, it was like spinning plates. I would always say it was like, who do you throw out of the lifeboat? All these bands are playing and I can't do all this work because it's a small label and they just need more people... Anyway, it kind of drove me nuts, and I would just feel the terrible pain of "I'm letting down Split Lip Rayfield if I take these calls for Trailer Bride, and I can't do both!" So it kind of drove me crazy. And I was starting to play music again...

Splendid: As a musician, too, it must have been like you were a kid stuck at home sick, watching other kids outside playing.

Hogan: Oh, it was totally Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Yeah. That came into play, and I tried to be the big man about it, and I'd be typing up itineraries and thinking "Man, I wanna be in the band! I wanna be having fart contests on the highway and playing shitty shows..." I love touring, so it started to eat my heart out a little bit. It just got too...ooky. People would ask me to sing on their records for Bloodshot and I'd be typing up their press releases listing the people who played on the record, and I'd have to list myself. It was just too creepy. I was gonna have to get an alias if I kept working there.

Splendid: There are a few other people in the city who are in that same situation.

Hogan: Like who?

Splendid: Scott Giampino at Touch & Go, for starters.

Hogan: Oh, yeah... Cash Audio.

Splendid: Yeah, doing PR for yourself is kind of weird.

Hogan: Yeah, it's weird. Does he do that?

Splendid: Yeah, he does.

Hogan: Wow. I'd have to have an alias. There was a band in Atlanta named Uncle Green (and then they were later called Three Pound Thrill). They were just like the Monkees -- they were these four smartass guys who lived in the same house, this Brady Bunch house with shag carpeting -- and when they first started, they invented a manager, gave him a name, got business cards for him and stationery... And whoever answered the phone, if they asked for the manager guy, he'd be like "Just a minute" and he'd get one of the other guys in the band. They'd take turns being him. And they'd thank him on their records... That way they could talk about themselves objectively, and ask for way more money than you'd feel like you could if you were asking for yourself, and I always thought that was brilliant. So that's what I was gonna have to do to keep working at Bloodshot.

Splendid: Just become a third party.

Hogan: Yeah, the Uncle Green plan. The invisible manager.

Splendid: Okay, so let's talk about your music. Before we get into Beneath the Country Underdog...am I totally wrong in thinking there was another album between The Whistle Only Dogs Can Hear and Underdog? Was there another record that just kind of vanished?

Hogan: No, just Rock*A*Teens. I was in the Rock*A*Teens. Whistle Only Dogs Can Hear was like, April or May of '96, and there was a Rock*A*Teens record in '97. And while I was in the Rock*A*Teens, that was mainly Chris Lopez -- his aesthetic and personal musical vision. But no, I never did another.

Splendid: I swear I saw another cover that was very much in the same style as Whistle's cover.

Hogan: What was it for? What did it look like?

Splendid: Well -- was that you on the cover of Whistle?

Hogan: In my underwear? Yes.

Splendid: Isn't there a cover along the same lines as that...

Hogan: Are my legs up in the air?

Splendid: Yeah.

Hogan: No, that was just an alternate take from that cheesecake session that my friend Chris Verene did, and they used it for a postcard sometimes. They wanted that to be the cover, and I was like "Hell no!" It was too...y'know.

Splendid: I really swear I saw that floating around with a different title on it, to the point where I actually looked for the record.

Hogan: No, it used to say "glamour puss" on the top.

Splendid: Yeah, that was it.

Hogan: My friends always made it say "glamour pussy". It was for this restaurant in Atlanta that I used to sing at -- Mumbo Jumbo, a real fancy kind of place. Like, here in Chicago it'd be on the Gold Coast and all those fancy rich people would come and I'd make tons of money singing jazz with a piano player and it was really fun. They used that for their mail-out postcard. They made a million of 'em, and they gave me a bunch of extras, so I used to write a "Y" on the end of "Glamour Puss" and hand 'em out. So no. My friend Chris Verene from Rock*A*Teens gave me for Christmas a cheesecake photo session -- Chris Verene, he's really great, he's gonna be world famous. But he takes cheesecake and he gave me a session and that was just two shots from that. "Modesty encouraged" -- that's his motto. I'd never done that -- it took lots of whiskey.

Splendid: You've always gravitated to a mix of other people's material and your own, and a very eclectic mix, but it kind of surprised me how few of your own songs were used on Beneath the Country Underdog.

Hogan: It's because I don't write any. I have a shrinky writer-penis. Even in Jody Grind, they were always after us to write more original songs, and the guys in the band would be writing all these songs, because they didn't have words. When I was in Rock*A*Teens, I was like "Oh, this is easy!" They were giving me shit all the time because you can write an instrumental song a lot more easily than a song you have to put words to, especially if you're the one that's gonna be singing it. They're like "Just sing anything." I'm like "I've gotta be the one to believe in what I'm singing." It never occurred to me to be a songwriter. I always loved to sing. Bill Taft from Jody Grind, when I first started playing with him -- I can't talk about Bill without imitating him. Nobody can. (In a Christopher Lloyd-y voice) "Kelly! I have this tape! It's got some stuff on it. I want you to take it home and write some words on my stuff!" And I was like, what, me write? And he was like, "Yeah, just take it home and write a song, and I'll see you on Tuesday with your new songs." So I wrote these two songs sitting in a pizza restaurant, and it was just accidental. It never occurred to me -- it still doesn't -- to write songs. I like singing. I want to be the best singer I can be. I think about songs to cover and I listen to records all the live-long day, but I just never feel like a decent songwriter. I don't feel strong about it. I've written a couple of songs sort of by accident, and they just sort of come out. Like Neko (Case), she's a songwriter -- she's crappin' out songs left and right. It's like those women who don't know they're pregnant -- "Oops! Look at this!" How don't they know? But she's just crappin' 'em out like golden eggs. I write one song a year if I'm lucky. It just doesn't occur to me.

Splendid: But your own songs hold up really well against the covers.

Hogan: It's scary enough to sing in front of people... I'd rather sing a cover song. Singin' my own songs freaks me out. It's more of a payoff when I start to like it, it becomes its own song... but mostly I'm just chicken. I don't think of myself as a songwriter. I just don't. I wrote a lot with Bill (Taft). I got along well with Bill. He and I were writin' tons of songs right when we split up, for (Bill Taft voice) "Physics, Hogan. That's why we've gotta split up. You can't be loud enough for me to turn up my guitar so that I can get off, and I can't turn down my guitar for you to sing..." Songwriting doesn't occur to me.

Andy (Hopkins) figured out that it's the Loretta Lynn Ratio: he was looking at her records in his collection one day, and she would write three songs per eleven, so we're working with the Loretta Ratio. That made me feel better.

Splendid: That's interesting, because of all the songs on the album, even more than (the Magnetic Fields') "Papa Was A Rodeo", I think "Crackers Rule," which you wrote, is the most distinctive.

Hogan: Really? Nobody liked that song. We played it tonight for the first time ever. Bloodshot didn't want that song on the album. They hated it. I love that song for the words, because I like the words. It's about a beautiful day, and let's go sit in the dark bar all day!

Splendid: It gets its mood across so well, I think.

Hogan: Does it? I can't tell. Neko likes that song the best too. I said "Really?" I almost started crying. But I like it, personally. The way it came out was kind of crazy. I wasn't totally satisfied with the hyper-dramatic way it ended up sounding. The trumpet didn't sound the way I wanted it to sound, but I thought it was really beautiful. But I had a dingier sound in mind. The whole record is really smooth -- there are rough parts, but I'm used to a more "rickety" record. But that makes me really happy. I love the words. "Crackers Rule" cracks me up. I think that's so funny.

Splendid: Do you get the most response from mainstream audiences for "Papa Was a Rodeo"?

Hogan: Yeah, I've seen playlists and that's what they always play. So I was like, phew, glad I saw the Magnetic Fields that night in July, and glad I heard about that song. I love you look at a record and you're like "Okay, I know what kind of record this is," and then you get to "Papa Was a Rodeo" and it's the thing that makes the dog turn sideways. Like in the Jody Grind, that's why we'd play jazz songs. I loved to see people watch us, and they'd watch our first song -- we'd do the Coltrane song, and they'd say "Oh, it's that kind of band," and they'd walk away and go talk to their friends some more. And then we'd do a Loretta Lynn song and they'd be like "Wha?!" It's a whiplash thing. People can't pigeonhole you, they can't really figure out what you are... it's much more free that way.

Splendid: There were some other songs that were written for Underdog that weren't used. I understand Johnny Dowd wrote a song for you?

Hogan: Yeah! I'm gonna try and do that later. Johnny Dowd is a really challenging person to cover, because when Johnny Dowd writes a song it doesn't necessarily have a melody that goes up and down, but with his voice he does it -- (as Dowd) "There's a mur-der here to-day". And he has the personality to handle it. But if someone else comes in and goes (operatically) "There was a murder here today" it doesn't work. But we might do it later. He talks about thighs in it, so that's...interesting. I love him. He's a funny man.

Splendid: Who else gave you stuff?

Hogan: Let's see... Lots of people were supposed to give me stuff. Paul Burch was supposed to write me a song... I don't want to name names.

Splendid: Are a lot more people coming forward now with songs for you?

Hogan: There's lots of unsolicited people... No. People I didn't ask bring me stuff, and that's great. That's good. There were songs that we wanted to cover on the record that we didn't get to. We're gonna record another record this winter and I want to do a whole Charlie Rich cover because I'm really into Charlie Rich. We were gonna do this Charlie Rich song called "Can't Go On" and it's very complicated -- very Phil Spectoresque, actually. But we couldn't do that. We were gonna do this Waylon Jennings song about an unwed mother, called "Tulsa"...we might do that later. It's just time. You get these fancy people in the studio, you've gotta milk 'em while you got 'em. It's just in and out.

Splendid: Another thing I noticed after listening to the album a lot over the last few days, having not really heard it that much since February, is that it really is a lot more "country" than I remembered it to be. And I don't mean that in a negative way --

Hogan: No, that's good!

Splendid: Since your prior career has been all over the map, style-wise, do you worry that you're getting stuck in the country rut?

Hogan: I don't think so. I was thinking about that. I've always had this country side to what I do, and I've been trying to concentrate on it. That was what they were trying to get the Jody Grind to do; we'd get taken out by these major labels and they'd be like, "If you can just concentrate on one angle of what you do..." And we'd tell 'em that's not what we're about, we do all this stuff... It was a good exercise for me to concentrate on the country side, and have that incorporate Magnetic Fields, Percy Sledge and stuff like that. And for the next record, I was thinking maybe I shouldn't do another record on Bloodshot where it has to have the country element, but I really love playing with John Rauhouse and Tom Ray -- Tom Ray can play other stuff, and Andy (Hopkins) can... But Underdog was supposed to be this country-soul hybrid, and the next one we're planning on doing another country-soul hybrid, but maybe the fraction of soul will be a little greater than the fraction of country. It'll still have that in there, though. I mean, my vowel sounds kind of brand me -- the way I say the "i" sound -- I can't help being from Georgia. I can't help liking country. My first crush in my life was Buck Owens; I can't get it out of my ground water. It's in there no matter what I'm singing.

Splendid: Do you ever worry that you're getting too far from punk rock, which seems to have been part of your original ethic?

Hogan: I don't think so, though I miss playing with Rock*A*Teens so bad... I don't know. Like I said, the last record was a lot smoother than I thought it'd be, so the next record'll be more rickety, I'm hoping.

Splendid: And maybe you'll try some rap or some techno or something?

Hogan: No, no techno. No rap. No. But maybe more soul, like some organ, and I want (violinist) Andrew Bird to play on it and he said he would. And maybe a little more western swing and jazz. That's what I miss. I'm getting too far away from what I used to do with Jody Grind -- I love jazz music and jazz songs and ballads.

I'm always running stop signs because I'm thinking about how to get all of this stuff together.

Splendid: Are you happy doing what you're doing now? Glad that you let the music pull you back in, as opposed to trying to get away from it?

Hogan: Oh yeah. Happy, and broke. Whatever.

Splendid: But you've got insurance.

Hogan: Yeah, insurance! Marie at the Hideout hustled and got us all some insurance. It's kind of cruddy insurance but my mom can sleep at night. Hell yeah! It's good. I recently cracked a rib, and that would've put me in the hole having to go for x-rays and stuff, so that was definitely good.

Splendid: So finally, with stuff like that in mind, would you say it's easier to make your music on your own terms when you've got a "day job"? Something that's going to be there so you don't have to worry so much about making a living with your music, and the compromises that entails?

Hogan: It's easier and harder, because like I said, you run stop signs because you're thinking about the music -- you want to do it really well. It has to be the right day job. Bartending's fine. Publicity was not a good job -- you have to be sort of called, it's a calling -- because it takes six million hours a week and the job is never done and there are too many bands and the leases never stop coming and these dreams... It's like the Sorceror's Apprentice. Too much stuff happening. You need to have a job that doesn't necessarily involve your mind. I used to love housepainting. Housepainting's my favorite deadbeat musician day job. Burrito rolling: too stressful. Didn't like the restaurant and dealing with the public. Housepainting's very zen-like. It's physical, and I'd rather do a physical job than sit all day. So bartending's good too. It's still social, but it's math and speed and efficiency and liquor. It's a double-edged sword. You've got your money but it takes away from your concentration and your time. You're always tired because you were shoving in practices before work or after work...the usual. Gotta have the right day job. Then it works fine.