Just wondering.
Apparently she’s retired to the woods of Northern California.
(I searched on Opal instead of Kendra Smith.)
Are you looking for OpalCat? Is there both an Opal and an OpalCat? 
Opal was a band with Dream Syndicate’s Kendra Smith. I was listening to Happy Nightmare, Baby last week and Early Recordings today and was just wondering whatever happened to her.
:smack: I thought you were talking about our Opal. Never mind.
Darn. I so wanted to have the third post in this thread. :smack:
Damnit, I thought so too. I’ve never heard of Opal.
Northern Line got a bit of airplay when it came out, but I was listening to a college station most of the time then. (Hm. Now I’m wondering whatever happened to KXLU’s DJ ‘Agent Ava’.)
Since she’s wiki-described as retired, I just want to check if you’ve kept up on what her Dream Syndicate bandmate Steve Wynn has been doing. He’s far from retired and is consistently putting out amazing albums and kicks ass live- I mean kicks ass live.
Good find.
Although, so as not to cause confusion, it should be pointed out that that is a “fan page”- no involvement from Kendra Smith herself.
Same is true of the Opal MySpace Page.
I bought that album when it first came out, but I knew about Kendra Smith before that, from a very cool album called Rainy Day, which I played on my radio show.
Kendra’s wonderful, and it’s sad that she hasn’t released anything solo since 1995’s Five Ways Of Disappearing, a very good album.
And there’s also Kendra’s Opal bandmate David Roback, who went on to found the group Mazzy Star with Kendra’s friend Hope Sandoval. Kendra, David and Hope all seem to have disappeared recently. Such a shame.
No, I haven’t been keeping track. I’m in the office today and don’t have audio on my computer. I’ll check out the links when I get home or this weekend.
I first heard her on KXLU when they played Northern Line. There’s just something about that song that got me, so I picked up Early Recordings shortly afterward. I got Happy Nightmare Baby too.
The most recent album slipped past my radar, I only found out about it when I looked for the links for this Thread. Prior to the most recent album (which I haven’t heard), the three previous albums, which he calls the “Desert Trilogy”, presented some of his best work- several steps above the very good solo albums he had been releasing quite regularly since the break up of The Dream Syndicate.
The albums went from “very good” to incredibly good starting with “Desert Trilogy”:
Here Come the Miracles 2001
Static Transmission 2003
…tick…tick…tick 2005
The website has short clips of songs that can be listened to for all the albums, but I think the clips are too short to form an opinion.
The MySpace page has full songs, mostly from the newest album- which I’m digging. The only full song on the MySpace that is from one of the albums I recommended is the song “Amphetamine” from the album Static Transmission.
Again, I didn’t recommend against the newest album- it’s just that I haven’t heard it. I’m digging songs on the MySpace page and I’ll definitely pick up the album.