When my older brother was in middle school, he played bass in a band with some friends. The drummer and lead guitarist were good, but the frontman, who sang and played rhythm guitar, was head and shoulders above the rest of the band. At 13 years old, he was already itching to break out on his own.
When the group broke up before high school, the frontman, James Kelley, started self-recording, self-producing and self-releasing his own music. His early work was incredible for a ninth grader, but not great by any other criterion.
In 2020, Kelley began releasing music under the moniker Cool Cousins. I never asked him the name’s origin, and now it feels too late. Cool Cousins has been one of my favorite musicians for the past two years. According to statsforspotify.com, as of early October 2023, he’s my 11th-most listened to artist of all time and my third-most listened to artist from the past six months.
Cool Cousins’ current Spotify page includes his 2022 self-titled album, and three albums and an EP from 2023. At face value, this looks impressive: Kelley, 21, released four projects in seven months. He played every instrument on each track and recorded, produced, mixed and released them himself — while attending college full time.
Kelley has a perennial problem of unreleasing his music. I can’t check, but I would guess he’s released over a dozen albums in all. I could not count how many times I have opened Spotify, looking for a specific Cool Cousins song or album, only to find that it has disappeared. If Kelley didn’t keep taking his music down, I’d probably listen to him even more.
Even in its truncated state, Cool Cousins’ discography is expansive. The influence of the late folk-rock legend Elliott Smith, who defined Portland’s late-’90s to early 2000s indie era, is evident.
As someone with a propensity for writing dense, verbose passages, songwriters’ ability to create vivid imagery in only a few lines never fails to impress me. Kelley’s knack for painting a scene, without being cheesy or overly complicated, amazes me more than most.
An especially poignant track is “Outside the Party,” an account of the indescribable, desolate feeling of waiting for your ride home while a party rages behind you. I can picture the song’s narrator standing on a darkened sidewalk, shoulders hunched, his cell phone pressed to his ear, while the thrum of the party shakes the sidewalk beneath him.
Kelley’s poetry shines most in his simplest songs, particularly “I Could Be Your Girl.” With only a few simple lines, he captures the feeling of huge mountain valleys of towering evergreens, highways threading their way between the Columbia River and waterfall-dotted cliffs and the particular fog one can only find on the small back roads near the Pacific.
This is not to say that Kelley is above critique. A violin can be heard on multiple tracks off his self-titled album, which Kelley plays himself. In order to make the violin fit with the rest of the song, Kelley autotuned it to the correct notes. The result is especially abrasive on “Thanksgiving,” where a screeching, uncertain string section clashes with Kelley’s banjo picking to create an at times nearly-unlistenable cacophony.
Another hiccup appears on “Outside the Party,” one of his more beautiful songs. Kelley says that he would “walk a mile before (he) call(s) (his) mommy,” and that he would “never say a word to make you” — the subject of the song — “salty.” The words “mommy” and “salty,” thrown into a song so otherwise redolent with desperate sadness, pull me out of the lyrics’ effect every single time.
Although I am likely Cool Cousins’ biggest fan, I am certainly not his only one. One of my closest friends, an incredibly talented guitarist and the second-biggest Elliott Smith fan I know (he thinks Smith’s cover of Big Star’s “Thirteen” is better than the original), once called Kelley “objectively better than most Elliott Smith (songs).”
A few months later, the same friend said Kelley was “literally Alex G,” an eminent current in-die-rock musician.
Kelley is no longer releasing music as Cool Cousins. In August 2023, he released two singles under his given name on Spotify. In October, he released a seven-song album from that account, a stark musical departure from Cool Cousins, and took down the singles.
Despite putting an incredible amount of effort into his music for almost a decade, Kelley has never received much recognition. As of October 2023, Cool Cousins has 61 monthly Spotify listeners; only two of his songs have over 1,000
streams.
Apart from his discouraging lack of listeners, Kelley’s life is simply moving in new directions. He’s now a senior in college. Soon, he’ll move out into the world. As sad as it is to think that Cool Cousins may never return, I am thankful for the few albums we still have — assuming that he doesn’t unrelease those ones, too.
