An accomplished guitarist with a unique funk-bluegrass style of fingerpicking, Kelly Zullo writes simple “Funkgrass- Americana” and yet still refuses to follow the rules.

If a spiritualist (not religious) version of jam band music were to meet an Americana songwriter, add funky acoustic plucking with fast bluegrass inspired licks, they might start to draw the outline of this caricature. Often writing about basic humanity, existential question, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or how “color is the soul spectrum of everything”, Kelly Zullo pontificates the layers beneath the universe that make the love stories work, that make feelings we entangle ourselves in.

As if the guitar isn’t enough to make the case to sit for another 60 seconds and hear what happens, the smooth voice which sometimes swerves between tones of Norah Jones to power of Heart, enraptures a convergence of all the elements of unspoken thoughts and melodic entanglement.

A former student of Belmont University and alumni of the old guard of Nashville’s “alt-notcountry” scene, Kelly worked at the cliche punk coffeeshop and struggled to live in the underworld of rock and pop music of Nashville after she found that she could just pull ideas out of thin air at 18 and found herself thrust into the magic of music row within months of arriving. A quick rollercoaster ride in Nashville at a young age gave her a lot to focus on and write about for the many years that would follow. No less than 3,000 shows, 6 album releases, an entire world traversed and toured with just a guitar and a one man band she called “the Invisible Circus” led her to the place where she just wanted to strip away all of the odometers running, layers of instruments, and just focus on playing, as strange as it sounds, 80’s covers. She reinvented herself in a tourist town in Eastern North Carolina while she rediscovered her style through the practice of actually learning others songs.

A studied sound engineer, drummer, bassist, saxophonist, vocalist, visual artist and of course guitarist, she is, as an old song once said “one of the hard core troubadours”, always finding a way to live as an artist and true to her style.

“Kelly Zullo writes songs that are very personal and therefore come across as credible. This, a dash of passion, a bit of quirkiness and healthy self-confidence - that is the perfect one-woman concert evening...
This American free spirit turns out to be true pearl in a sea of ??singer-songwriters.." - Von Sandra Knobloch - www.donaukurier.de

"Live review @ Neuewelt, Ingolstadt, Germany"