Write (and sing) About Love

With mid-February days away, Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, as is the backlash that accompanies it each year. Public displays of affection and mushy subplots on every episode of network television can feel assaultive to the hopelessly alone. Denouncements of the holiday may be more common than endorsements.

It is a state of mind that local playwright and storyteller Kevin Kling understands but that certainly does not mean that he subscribes to it. “There is a negative impression of Valentine’s Day because there is a pressure associated with it.

The last thing anyone wants is pressure to feel love,” said Kling. “Maybe people have begun to associate the word ‘love’ with sappiness, but it is still crucial to have love, to be human and have a full life.”

This Saturday, Kling will host and curate “Cold Feet, Warm Hearts”: a night of songs, poems and stories all dedicated to the subject of love at the O’Shaughnessy Auditorium in St. Paul. The evening will feature an impressive roster of local musicians and performers, including Dan Chouinard, Bradley Greenwald and Simone Perrin.

“This is a group that represents long-standing, deep connections and collaborations,” said Dan Chouinard, a local musician and public radio contributor who will play piano in the show. “We’re good friends, and we have worked on various projects in the past.”

It is the same group that performed in the similarly themed show “Breakin’ Hearts and Takin’ Names” three years ago.

“That show was incredibly successful,” said Kling. “The audience responded so well. It was absolutely one of the highlights of my career. I couldn’t wait to try it again, but you don’t try to repeat something exactly. It never seems to work.”

One of few things that will remain from the previous show is a “piano bar rendition” of the B-52’s classic, “Love Shack.”

Kling will be the focal point of the show, but it is very much a collaborative effort.

“Everyone in the show is an expert in these different kinds of music, so I asked them to bring in their favorite love songs — songs they wanted to do or a genre they’d never tried before,” said Kling. “From this mixture, there will be threads and through-lines. We take these different, seemingly disparate pieces and from them, a show forms.”

Some of the overarching themes of the show are what one would expect from a show near Valentine’s Day but not all.

“Most of the stories are autobiographic. Most are humorous. Not forgetting that love has a lot of different values and can be very serious, but love thrives in audacity,” Kling said. “It dies in carelessness and thrives in audacity. That is becoming clearer and a main theme of this show.”

Themes of different sections may fall in line, but content within each individual piece will vary just as the style of performance does.

“I’m trying to work through the ages. From Bible stories, modern stories, stories from my own childhood and songs that span centuries,” Kling said. “I want to capture something about the timelessness of love in ourselves. When someone talks of a love that is no longer there, the love still exists in them. We carry them in our hearts.”

While themes like this might make it feel mandatory to bring a date, more than romantic love will be explored.

“Courtly love is just a sliver of the spectrum,” Kling said. “There are so many forms, but the simplest is just a recognition. Looking at someone and seeing something of yourself.”

Rumors of the appearance of a pink horse live on stage have circulated, which Kling would neither confirm nor deny.

“There’s a bit of this show that is still up in the air. There is a bit of the unknown coming in. That’s the reason to have a live show,” Kling said. “You’re in a real room with real people, and there’s an exchange that is greater than the topic. There’s an exchange of an understanding and a recognition of something in each other.”