Chicago, IL · punk rock · folk-punk

Brendan Kelly

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The Lawrence Arms' motormouth bassist-singer, solo and unfiltered — bar-stool wit and self-deprecation over rough acoustic punk, half gig and half stand-up set.

Brendan Kelly, born September 8, 1976, is a Chicago punk musician best known as bassist and co-vocalist of The Lawrence Arms, the trio he has fronted with Chris McCaughan since the late 1990s. He studied radio, television and film at Northwestern University, graduating in 2000, before settling into music full time.

His other bands include The Broadways, Slapstick and The Falcon, where he plays guitar and sings lead, alongside his own band, The Wandering Birds. He has also lent backup vocals to records by the Copyrights and Common Rider, and added a guest vocal to Alkaline Trio's song 'I Wanna Be a Warhol'.

His songs favour dense, wordy lyrics, gallows humour and self-deprecation, delivered in a hoarse shout. Solo shows strip the arrangements down to acoustic guitar, with Kelly filling the space between songs with rambling, comic commentary that blurs the line between a gig and a stand-up set.

Outside music, Kelly spent years working as an advertising copywriter, a job that soured him enough to launch the Nihilist Arby's Twitter account in 2015, a stream of bleak, absurdist tweets about corporate life that eventually led to work with The Onion's ad team. He has also co-hosted Chicago's JBTV and kept a blog, Bad Sandwich Chronicles, with fellow musicians Laura Jane Grace and Brian Fallon, mixing scatological humour with stories from life on the road.

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punk rockfolk-punk