About

Every winter, Cleveland, Ohio, tests the love of its faithful. Starting around late November and often lasting through April, temperatures dip below freezing; wind whips off Lake Erie, stealing even more heat from passing bodies; and clouds obscure the sun and blanket the city with snow and ice. For months, gray and white become the landscape’s dominant colors, and the lake turns a churning gray-green flecked with ice.
A few hearty souls take advantage of the extreme weather and surf the wind- kicked waves at Edgewater Beach, a sandy inlet just west of downtown, but most Clevelanders elect to hunker down indoors and wait out the season, often fortified with a favorite local brew.
Understandably, Craig Ramsey has experimented with a trial separation from his longtime home during these less-than-hospitable months. For the past several winters, the singer-songwriter-producer has loaded up a vintage RV with the contents of his eastside recording studio and pointed the vehicle south, down Interstate 71.
While the rest of Cleveland awaits spring’s arrival, Craig wanders through Florida, where he periodically stops to write and record songs wherever he can find a friendly source of electricity (the artsy fishing village of Matlacha, outside of Fort Myers, has been especially kind to him). There, in the comfort of his home away from home— sun streaming through the windows, side door thrown open to the salty breeze—he tracks his songs’ richly orchestrated parts, eventually returning to Cleveland to record acoustic drums and create the final mix.
The first results of this nomadic approach to his art can be heard on the fittingly titled Home/Away, the stunning debut album by Kalaika (pronounced ka-LAHY-ka). In some ways, Kalaika not only represents a departure from home, but also a departure from self.
Jeremy Leuenberger providing soft-rock sparks via his on five songs), he
ultimately felt more comfortable creating figurative distance for himself by attributing the songs to a group name of sorts. Kalaika, as a quick Google search will tell you, is Hawaiian for “Craig,” a fact the songwriter learned at a young age when his grandmother returned home from a tropical vacation one winter with souvenir trays bearing her grandchildren’s island names.
Similarly, Craig has brought back a healthy dose of sunshine from his own journeys. Beds of acoustic guitars strum major chords to Merseybeat and Motown rhythms. Glockenspiel, organ and synth-strings shadow his indelible vocal melodies. Softly stacked harmonies lift the songs into Brian Wilson territory, as do the melancholy lyrical concerns that contrast the music’s bright surfaces. The effect is like that of a dream-pop Beach Boys, with Craig penning—not “teenage symphonies to God,” as Wilson once aspired to write—but picture postcards inviting us all to escape. At least for a little while.