Kelly Love Jones - 11/28/2007

Singer/songwriter

Holiday highlight

Kelly Love Jones forgoes the myriad open mics she attends for one performance: On Saturday, Dec. 1, Jones will participate in the Holiday Soul Funk Festival presented by Hot Ice at Sugarhill in Underground Atlanta. The New Orleans native is focusing on her follow-up to Portrait of a Solo Artist, which she hopes to complete by the end of the year.

“Really, I just started a little hiatus to allow my creative juices to take a rest. I’m still working on some new material, but I just kind of stepped away from the city for a little while. I stay in the mountains right now about an hour and a half from Atlanta, in Toccoa. It has this feeling of the Native American presence that’s just really entering my spirit right now. I just come to the city every now and then. We’ve been recording the album and getting that together, and hopefully in December we’ll be finishing up with it. We’re recording it here in Atlanta.

“The two holidays since Katrina, I’ve been here. I don’t really celebrate very much, but I go and visit my family and say hello. Any time you can get your family in one room and with smiles on their faces, it’s always a good thing.

“And I get a chance to put them on the new CD. I have my cousin playing with me who played guitar with me when I first started. We used to rhyme together in the basement and now we’re on this album together smashing it. I got my other brother Rocky on there; I got Mausiki Scales doing co-production and playing the keys on it. I pulled no punches. I wanna do this full force, all the way, and we brought in the heavy hitters to make it happen.”