With artful authenticity, Taylor Kelly has spent the last few years refining her sound, a warmly cohesive blend of jazz, soul, and funk that has earned her the love of online and live audiences alike. With a handful of dates left on her U.S. headlining summer tour, she’s continuing to share her latest collection—The Spins EP, her sixth studio release—with fans. But her catalog is a deep-running well of radiant gems just waiting to be discovered.
Originally from Rochester, NY, Kelly grew up in a home that encouraged and fostered an ardent appreciation for the arts. Both her parents were artistic in some way—her mother had been a dancer, and her father had played the trumpet through college—which fed those early adolescent experimentations with band and choir. At the Berklee College of Music, she started exploring songwriting alongside her studies of music theory.
It was in college that she started to lean into the nuanced complexities of jazz, which abound on debut Change of the Weather (2015), chasing a technical sophistication she’s glad to have outgrown. Now Taylor embraces the elegant simplicity of lyrics and melodies that come straight from the heart—adorned solely by an earnest vulnerability and a soul-touching resonance.
Her debut EP, Do You Feel Me, introduced her as an ecstatically voiced singer whose words were as electrifying and soothing as the music that enveloped them. Thanks to TikTok, the dreamily buoyant and bubbly grooves of her single “California” became the earworm many new listeners discovered her music through during the pandemic. The arrival of her sophomore album, Up Up and Away (2019), brought with it a body of songs at once intimate and universal, gushing with love, heartache, and anxious uncertainty.
In 2022, the same year she released another EP, All I Need—which further entrenched her sound in reflective glimmers of guitar-driven R&B, pop, and funk—she recorded Live in Philly on New Year’s Eve while opening for St. Paul and the Broken Bones. Apart from capturing the resplendent tapestry of sound and fervent emotion that she brings to the stage, it also features a cover of Soundgarden‘s “Black Hole Sun” that’ll leave you riddled with chills, proving beyond doubt she’s a vocal powerhouse.
The six tracks of Taylor’s The Spins EP find the singer occupying richly textured soundscapes replete with the swell of sweetly plucked strings and the call of balmy horns. Even at their most sparse, the spaces in between those instrumentals glow with the twinkle of piano keys, sonorous production, and her own dulcet, honeyed coos. Some absolute standouts include the spellbinding “Fit In” and slow rolling funk of “Attention,” which crescendos irresistibly toward a thrilling guitar solo.
In a post on Instagram, Taylor gushed over the release of a project that stands as a milestone in her long journey as an artist: “I am 32 today. I also released my 6th studio project today. Sometimes I forget that 16 year old me so badly wanted a career in music but had no idea how to get there or what it’d look like. She had no idea that she’d be writing her own songs at age 20 or putting out her first album on her 21st birthday – that she’d end up moving to Philadelphia at 24 and by 27 had played her music everywhere from New York to Nashville to Montreal to Chicago.”
She continued: “Today I’m reminding myself of why I’m here. It’s not because I want to be rich or be a household name – it’s because I want to feel everything there is to feel, truly wholly and deeply. I want to always be conscious of the power and necessity of community, of art, of nature, of life itself. So, here I am, with $20 in my bank account, feeling everything all at once, but mostly love – and gratitude – for this life, for art, for community, for the fact that my music will live on when I’ve been long gone – because it’s so much bigger than I will ever be.”
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Every clip we’ve seen of Taylor on the road for The Spins Tour has only affirmed everything we’ve already learned from listening to her music: this is an artist who not only thrives in the limelight but leaves the spaces she performs in—as well as the people who witness her—brighter and lighter than they were before. To say we’re eagerly awaiting her next project, even as we keep the replay button on her entire catalog, is an understatement.
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Words: Steven Ward
Visit Taylor Kelly on her website and Instagram to stay updated on new releases and tour announcements.
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