With the release of NORTHERN GOTHIC in 2002, Jeff Kelly and the Green Pajamas took a left turn down a crooked, two lane road, into dark Americana, for what would be the first of a trilogy. The album often draws on Kelly’s childhood memories of rural Washington state: “My dad was a truck driver, hauling heavy machinery, and his dad was a gas boat operator on the Salish sea. I would often ride along with my dad in the cab of his Kenworth. As a kid, I got to see a lot of places that I imagine many Seattleites wouldn’t necessarily set off to visit on purpose…” He also drew on memories of summer visits to his aunt and uncle’s cabin at Lost Lake, near Shelton, the place where he found himself swimming with a snake and almost set the woods on fire with a bottle rocket one Independence Day evening, and right on through to into his adult life as a father: “When we started taking our own kids to the coast every summer in the 1990s, the landscape and small towns like Grayland, right on the ocean, started bringing back some vivid memories and I decided to write some songs.”
Songs like, ‘In the Darkness,’ ‘Bitter Moon’ and ‘The Cruel Night.’ Along with these we have songs born from more recent events of the time: Kelly wrote, ‘Blue Halloween Moon,’ that eerie, first Halloween after 9-11 and the wildly psychedelic, ‘In the Burning Moonlight,’ after being struck by a painting his wife, Susanne, made. Eric Lichter’s, ‘Coyotes and Comets,’ is a direct result of a then recent trip to Arizona and Laura Weller’s, ‘Christine Crystalline,’ was a contemporary commentary, a ferocious live version of which is included in this vinyl edition. Here too are the author-approved songs inspired by the books, ‘First Love,’ by, Joyce Carol Oates, and, ‘Lost Girls,’ by the late, Andrew Pyper. ‘Lost Girls Song’ is Jeff’s favorite song on the album and still a fan favorite: “Andrew Pyper emailed me out of the blue and said a friend had given him NORTHERN GOTHIC as a gift and that he wanted to use my, ‘Lost Girls Song,’ in a film of the novel! Alas, it was optioned but never completed.”