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Kasey Anderson Figures it Out in Song
Excerpt from an article by Ryan White in The Oregonian, February 25, 2010.
Kasey Anderson’s new record, Nowhere Nights, is an unflinching document of his feelings about eight years in Bellingham, Wash. … "five years longer than I should have been there and two years longer than I wanted to.
"There's comfort in knowing I'm not the first person to go through this," Anderson says. "What I had to figure out is what they figured out: You can experience everything on your own. You can't always endure everything on your own."
The record's anchor, then, and its strength is that its location is emotional, not geographical.
Anderson moved to Bellingham in 1998 to go to Western Washington University, where he was an English major. By 2000 he was back in Portland (for a girlfriend; it didn't work out) and then back to Bellingham. Thanks to advances in online education, he got that English degree in 2008 from Marylhurst, a "piece of paper that said, I, too, don't understand 'Finnegans Wake,' " he says.
But he probably does. Books such as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried come up in conversation. His senior thesis was about the impact of the Black Panther movement on American literature.
By 2008 he'd released two records, "Dead Roses" and "The Reckoning," and begun collecting praise for his sharp, literate Americana songs.