Cleveland Native Kramies Lands Back in Northeast Ohio After One Long, Strange Musical Trip

When local singer-songwriter Kramies was still a teenager, he began playing shows with his shoegazer band Pot Roast. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the group played Flash Gordon’s, a now defunct venue that Kramies, who grew up in Fairview Park, describes as a “glam metal divebar.” It was a formative experience.

“I opened for TOOL and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones when I was 17, and from that point on, this is all I’ve been doing,” he says one afternoon while sitting cross-legged on a sofa at Dark Currents, a rehearsal space/studio located on Cleveland’s near West side. With his frizzy hair and maniacal laugh, Kramies comes off as a gentler and kinder version of the titular character that Gene Wilder portrayed in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

Kramies, who returned to Cleveland earlier this year, has just released an EP of acoustic tracks taken from his 2022 self-titled LP and is now working on a full-length of new tunes slated to come out in 2024.

After Pot Roast, Kramies joined a band called Grooveyard that featured Jerry Becker, who would go to join the San Francisco pop-rock band Train.

“Then, I wanted to write my own songs,” says Kramies. “I wrote all these songs and was super into David Bowie and the whole art-rock thing. I have always had an addictive personality. I was getting into drugs and would write acoustic David Bowie-esque type stuff.”

He moved to Hudson and recorded a solo album at an old church there. Local musician Matt Cassidy, a talented producer in addition to being a terrific player, brought the album to life; it came out under the band name Channel.

“[Cassidy] was a guitar player, and I couldn’t believe how much sound came out of his instrument,” says Kramies, adding that Channel opened for national acts such as Calexico, Grandaddy and Red House Painters. “To this day, Matt has no idea how much he influenced me back in those days.”

That band lasted until 1998. At that point, Karmies was using cocaine and had developed an addiction that he says impaired his ability to develop and mature as an artist. In 2004, he decided to get sober and eventually signed a solo deal with Hidden Shoal, an Australian label with world-wide distribution. While touring in Ireland Kramies became inspired by the unique wooden toys he saw one evening at a Galway, Ireland toy shop called the Wooden Heart. He then reached out to Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and Guided by Voices’s Todd Tobias to produce a collection of songs. The Wooden Heart EP released in 2013, that album caught the attention of acts such as Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev.

“Things took off from there,” says Kramies. “I was recording music in a tiny closet in a small apartment in Denver. I got huge traction. At that point, I started doing interviews as a solo artist, and my name was going overseas.”

A sold-out show at a French theater yielded the live album, Forêts Antiques Live at the Grand Théâtre. It finds Kramies playing acoustic versions of songs such as “Sea Otter Cottage” and “The Fate That Never Favored Us.” The songs possess the fragility of tunes by someone like the late Nick Drake, the great English singer-songwriter who released three albums in the early 1970s before retreating from the public spotlight.

In the wake of that his album’s release, NPR and BBC picked up his music.

“All the labels that used to ignore me started to contact me,” says Kramies. “I started understanding the business and cutting out middle people. What blows me away is the amount of press I’ve received in the last nine years. I’m in awe of it and super grateful. I got called the American Dream-Pop Troubadour, and I hated that. I was going to destroy that with the 2018 EP Of all the Places Been & Everything the End  [which was written in 2017 while Kramies lived in a haunted castle in Ireland], but that EP made the American Dream-Pop Troubadour title worse. I remember talking to Jerry [Becker] from Train, who said, ‘Just go with it. At least they’re fucking talking about you.’ So I let it go.”

In 2022, he released a self-titled album featuring Tyler Ramsey, Patrick Carney (Black Keys), Becker, and Lytle and followed it with “Ohio I’ll Be Fine,” a track featuring Becker on keys, guitar and strings as well as Counting Crows drummer Jim Bogios. In 2022, he also recorded music for the soundtrack to a French book and went on a book tour throughout France.

For his forthcoming studio album that’s due out next year, Kramies and producer Mario McCulty (David Bowie, Prince) have teamed up.

“He’s worked with everybody including my biggest influence, David Bowie,” says Kramies. After a “really nice conversation,” the two decided to work together on the forthcoming 2024 album.

“He’s taken things to a whole new working level,” says Kramies.

With the success of the 2022 LP, which landed two songs in the top ten radio charts and was awarded seven “top albums of the year” by various critics/polls, Kramies decided to release four of the songs from last year’s LP as the original acoustic takes cut back before all the studio magic was added. This is a one-off limited release acoustic EP.

Kramies says another overseas tour is in the works as well. While his name and work continues to be that of an international act, Kramies says he’s happy to be back in Cleveland.

“I love it here in Cleveland,” he says. “This is the next stage of stuff, and I’m really excited to be back after 16 years where it started. I never know where I’ll be off to next but It’ll be amazing to see where it goes. It’s been an amazing ride.”

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