She drifts you from the drearies while smartly smiling at a confusing world with old-school determination to turn frowns upside down, and that’s because she’s finally telling her tale instead of bellowing another’s silly and senseless syllables from a time she’s never endured or experienced.
Meet Kaydon Hardman Board and you’ll encounter a wife, a mother, a daughter, a bartender, and a bandmate on the surface, sure, but she’s a storyteller, too, who swings on life’s chandeliers not out of crazy but for the new view that reveals much more than grounded eyes ever see. She sings to you and for you – Kaydon includes you – instead of caroling AT audiences with an insulting and numbing anonymity.
She glides and slides and she sneaks her peaks while sifting the right rhymes for the next best ballad that embraces the tale this 31-year-old’s old soul and her new band, Company Caravan, are trying to tell with a genuine tone and authentic sound.
“But what am I trying to create? That’s a very good question,” Board said. “I want to create emotion. I want to create a feeling. I want to create discussion. I want the listeners to figure it out for themselves.
“I want my music to be a connection for people who put their own meaning behind the music. Everyone’s world is different, so the music means something different to each person,” she said. “Music has always been something that has brought people together, and that’s what I want.”
Company Caravan is a rock revival band that features Rachel Krems on bass guitar, Ethan Greene on drums, Jacob Carpenter on lead guitar, and Board stands in the middle with lead vocals. They played last Friday at the Polish American Patriot Club in South Wheeling and will take the stage at the Silver Rail Bar & Grill on Friday, October 18th.
“I started Company Caravan because I wanted to start a fan that would perform original music. I wanted to write my own music. I wanted to see what I could do. I’ve loved music my whole life,” Board explained. “I’ve sang in a few different bands, and I loved it. I had a lot of fun and got to sing some of the best songs ever recorded.
“But the songs weren’t my own stuff, so that’s why I recruited the members of the band and I feel very lucky to have everyone. I ask Rachel first, and then Ethan, and then Jacob, and it all came together,” she detailed. “I wanted to write my own music, and it means a lot to me that those guys are in it with me because being in a band can be like running a business. There’s a lot to it, and it’s a time thing. It’s like picking up a side job.”
A Rock Revival
The Wheeling area possesses a healthy live and local music scene with a number of different venues in East Ohio and the Northern Panhandle featuring solo, duo, and band acts each weekend of the year.
Board, of course, wants Company Caravan to play each and every one of them, too, but right now? Well, she’s a bit entranced with composition.
“OK, so we have five original songs and we’re working on three more right now,” she revealed. “We all write the music, and I write the lyrics, and I really do want people to come up with their own interpretations of our songs. I know what I was thinking about when I was writing ‘Mystic Mama’ and ‘Ignitor,’ but I love to hear how my songs make other people feel; what they make other people think about and how they make them feel.
“Music is the thing for me, and it always has been since I started singing Disney songs when I was a child. My mom said I wouldn’t stop singing. Ever,” she revealed. “’Just Around the Riverbend’ was the one song my mom said I wouldn’t stop singing when I was very young. And I still love that song.”
She and her husband, Derik, formed Kaydon & The Kingsmen close to 10 years ago, and then she was the lead singer for a pair of popular cover bands, The Rip Rockers and Tongue n’ Cheek.
“I just kept singing and people kept telling me to keep singing, too, but I do question my abilities all of the time. People tell me I’m crazy, but I think it’s pretty normal,” Board said with a chuckle. “But music is like a magnet that’s embedded in my soul. Every time I have gone away from music, I have soon found myself right back in the middle of it somehow because of that magnet.
“I just feel the music so deeply. It’s a part of me and always has been. That’s why, right now, it’s important for me to write. It’s there. Inside me. And it feels great to let it out.”
