by Brian Tucker, StarNews

The third time’s the charm for musician/producer Thom Kunz and singer Joan Childress Wilkerson, who’ve written and recorded a new album, “Accidental Crashes,” and have a record release show Thursday, Dec. 14, at New Anthem Beer Project in downtown Wilmington.

Over the past two-plus years, Kunz has stayed busy writing, recording and producing material with multiple singers, including two full-length albums and two EPs. Kunz’s 2015 debut “Paper Brain” featured a handful of singers as well, with Wilkerson providing lead vocals on the concept album’s epic opener, “Cuts Like a Song.”

“Joan stepped in for many of those darker rock songs,” Kunz said. “I realized she was the kind of gifted singer who can inhabit a song, slip into its bones. It’s not about hitting all the right notes. It’s about being human, about feel and performance, about storytelling.”

Wilkerson has a rocker’s voice, heated and passionate, but her delivery on the more restrained material of “Accidental Crashes” lends additional layers of hurt and emotion.

“After our first session with ‘Cuts Like a Song,’ I knew we’d be just fine,” Wilkerson said. “We were able to have clear, direct communication without any insult. (At) the end of the project I remember looking at each other and being like, ‘OK, what’s next?’”

Wilkerson’s collection of damaged iPhones got things started. Collected in her Corolla’s center console, they held memories -- photos, voice mails -- she couldn’t access. Wilkerson wanted to make an album of six songs about six people from her life, all tied to the phones. Kunz produced Wilkerson’s 2016 debut, “iBreak iPhones.”

“Those phones she kept like a graveyard in her car,” Kunz said. “It was personal and autobiographical, I was so grateful she’d shared the idea with me. We’d already established trust as friends. After ‘Paper Brain,’ we’d found trust as artists.”

The new album, “Accidental Crashes,” is a mix of melodic and atmospheric songs. Some are quite direct, like the bittersweet “MichAgain,” whose melody Wilkerson sang into her phone for safekeeping while on a walk. On album closer “Out Loud,” Wilkerson rhymes “greener pastures” with “our great disasters” and expresses frank desperation when she sings, “Would you please get on that plane, because I still cannot say your name.”

Ideas grew from conversations about connections between men and women, and how relationships can unravel to reveal individual, damaged components when two entities stop functioning together. The idea of warped cassettes came to symbolize these thoughts. One rainy day, Kunz recorded an ambulance in the distance, knowing he would use it to open the record.

“I imagined someone walking away from the accident with cassettes, maybe from one of the cars,” Kunz said. “On them were stories. The album occasionally reminds the listener that he/she is sort of eavesdropping on someone playing them.”

It’s music with a sense of longing, and Kunz said that there are songs about affairs that need to end (“Contempt”); an abusive, co-dependent couple who can’t break up (“Home”); and the brave ones who find the courage to move on (“Out Loud”).

“The best connections are those beyond the obvious ones we initially intended,” Kunz said. “That’s one of the great unconscious things albums can do.”