Grant Klein defies space-time with new album The Teleporter

Over the last few months, local artist Grant Klein dropped snippets of the ethereal narrative he weaves in his second solo album, The Teleporter. These tracks and others coalesce in an album that dissects chronological time and comments upon the nature of who we were and are.

The full album is out today, and you can listen here.

Klein’s first band {Parenthesis} formed in 2015 with guitar-mate Skyler Mayes. His first full-length album as a solo artist, Clementine, released 2020. EPs and singles have speckled the years throughout.

Klein brings a touch of analytical reflection to his lyrics, and they go deeper than skin-level pop ballads. Vulnerabilities addressing what it feels to miss someone—both someone who has departed the living world, and another part of a not-so-distant-past—adorn the narrative questioning who we are in the present moment.

Ever since hearing the sneak peek before our interview, I’ve been anticipating Klein’s album release. I’m apt to share it widely: it’s heartfelt and thought-provoking. Without giving too much away, I will say I did encounter tears pooling in my eyes at the poignant lyrics on allusory track “Fleabag.”

Grant Klein // Image courtesy of artist

Currently based in Kansas City, Klein was born in Santa Barbara, California, where he spent the first four years of his life. In an early memory, he recalls walking down a path to the beach lined with short brush. He denotes the brush as “short” now, but remembers it then as taller than him.

The single cover art for “Time Travelers” features an image of an infant Klein on a similar California beach. He sits contentedly on sand, overlorded by a sky full of clocks looking down upon him. At the time of writing this track that is also on The Teleporter, he wasn’t as close to many people in his life that he is now, including his parents. He tells me it’s his father playing volleyball on the beach that peeks through the right side of the frame. 

“That picture really captured the place in my life where I was at,” Klein says in choosing to pair it with the track. As an older version of himself, he’s able to look back at this picture, interrogating, “How much of me is still the same as I was then? Is any of this still here?” 

“Time Travelers” is embedded halfway through The Teleporter, yet it is with this question that the circle begins, revises itself, and loops back throughout the album, from first track to last. 

Klein approaches the album arrangement by mentally dividing it into an A side and a B side. 

“I actually wrote the second half first,” he shares. “From “Space” through “Glass Museum”—all of that was written between 2022 to 2023, when I was in a time of going through a lot of change. When I started writing again, it was all about, ‘I miss how it was, I miss who I used to be with, I miss who I used to be.’ I wish I could go back to that—is it possible to go back to that?”

In some ways for Klein, the answer is yes. That earlier person he missed being around? The one who belonged to a not-so-distant past? In the midst of this process, she again became part of the present—and now the future. He and his high school sweetheart rekindled their relationship, yielding an engagement and a soon-to-be marriage. 

Grant Klein // image courtesy of artist

Side A—unofficially, only in Klein’s songwriting brain—was written second. If you divide it mentally as he does, it’s the happier of the two parts, the part full of lightness and all things settled. Yet there is that tinge of melancholy that can only arise from an all-encompassing awareness of having something again after once losing it. 

That first section of songs happened after reconnecting with his now-fiancée. He loved who he was and who he was around, both her and familiar people, the relationship brought into his life again. 

“I think this makes a very compelling narrative start to finish,” he tells. “It illustrates what I was missing in the second half.”

With his chosen sequence, he pulls a time-traveler’s trademark by rearranging the timeline. 

The Teleporter’s story, combined with production quality and lyrics, mounts a fantastic musical artistry. Klein recorded at a studio in Nashville with producer Jonathan Michael Beard. Every note has a heft to it, illuminating a warm resonance as the etch of fingers on strings and pressing on keys rounds out each track’s sound. There’s a touch of real-time feeling imbued in the live instruments Klein plays. And he plays all—mellotron, piano, percussion, classical guitar… [except kulele, mandolin, and bass.]

The Teleporter is out now on Spotify.