With a glistening piano opening, Doug Kistner who’s had an electric career starts by singing “looking back on my life” and it’s hard to blame him why. The man’s been doing so much work for so many years, he’s no doubt had his fair share of ups and downs. He’s taking this all to the stage and the recording booth with “Only Road I Know”, the first of two singles now available on major streaming platforms. The jams this track has are those that kind of surprise you with how confident they sound. There’s hardly anything amateur about how Kistner has packaged this song and its follow up which we’ll get to in a moment.
There’s this fantastic rhythm that’s always building on itself and the drum work by Dave Anthony is especially worth noting because it’s just so good. Drumming is one of those elements that gets overlooked a lot because it’s usually invisible, but there’s something in its power on display in these tracks that really make it something special. Sometimes the songwriting can be a little mundane, you could probably find plenty of songs of this variety from literally dozens of artists and maybe get the same effect, but there’s something so unique to Kistner’s presentation that makes them feel very original. He says at one point to let the music get you through the day and who could argue with him when he’s cranking out jams like this.
The second song in the pair “Since We Left Our Dreams” switches gears to a more pseudo-romantic feeling, not in that it’s a love song, even though in a way it almost kind of is. It’s a love letter to the past and the realizations you have as you get older. It feels like a perfect follow-up to the previous song, and maybe one that’s a little lighter in tone. For songs that are almost 5 minutes in length, it’s kind of amazing how packed these songs are in the sounds department when their chorus’ takes up a heft amount of the song, but they never feel rushed or repetitive. Multiple times even after writing the lyrics down, I found myself coming back to how they felt like they had so much more lyrical content but it’s just how good these hooks are. These are songs that feel full and filled with a beating heart.
Currently, Kistner is performing with the band The Lords of 52nd Street which features some former members of Billy Joel’s band, and that makes sense considering the sounds of Kistner. I would like to see him step out of his comfort zone with this style of music for even just a track or two, nothing too tonally out there, but something that feels a little different and less a faithful recreation of what it is that he loves and has been a part of for so long. He did sing that we have to move on at some point even if for now this is the only road he knows, but it’s a damn smooth one.
Jodi Marxbury