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Karen and the Sorrows’ Karen Pittelman Interviewed by The Bluegrass Situation

Karen and the Sorrows
Photo by Carole Litwin

A queer Jew from Brooklyn seems like the most unlikely candidate to front a country band, right? If you factor in Karen Pittelman’s past experience singing and performing punk and queercore, her current old country-influenced, honky tonk-inspired group, Karen & the Sorrows, seems even more implausible. Addressing these kind of assumptions about who “owns” country or who is allowed “admission” to country — by the mainstream country machine, country radio, country writers, or country fans at large — is why the following conversation is so important. On the surface, it would be easy, even hackneyed, to presume that Pittelman and company came to country as opportunists on the waves of the Americana tide. But considering LGBTQ+ identities and perspectives in roots music necessitates digging deeper. Doing so in our laughter-filled dialogue with Pittelman was both enlightening and encouraging.

Before Karen & the Sorrows, you were singing in a punk band. I wonder how you bridged the gap between punk and country — it sounds like it was something of a homecoming for you. Did identity play into you leaving country behind? Did you feel that in punk you would be more free to be yourself rather than in country?

Yeah, I think that that’s true. I came up around queercore, a place where making music and building queer community are all one thing. But I also think the distance between country and punk isn’t as far as people like to think. Who’s more punk than Johnny Cash? Johnny Cash is punk as fuck. I think, in terms of genres that give you a space to tap into anger and make something out of that, punk and country are two of the best. Punk isn’t so good for heartbreak and that’s what took me back to country. Really, what I love the most are sad songs. My heart was broken and, I dunno, I guess when my heart breaks, pedal steel comes out. [Laughs] Different things happen for different people’s hearts, but that’s what’s in mine, so I had to come back to country, whether I wanted to or not.

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Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

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Karen and the Sorrows’ Karen Pittelman Shares ’10 Queer Country Artists Country Music Fans Should Know’ with The Boot

Karen and the Sorrows
Photo by Carole Litwin

“Country music isn’t always welcoming to LGBT people,” says Karen & the Sorrows‘ Karen Pittelman. “But we still love it, even if it doesn’t always love us back.”

Mainstream country music fans are likely familiar with Chely Wright, Ty Herndon, Brandy Clark and songwriter Shane McAnally; fans of Americana and alt-country may know Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, and perhaps Karen & the Sorrows, too. But there are a number of other LGBTQ artists and acts who still fly a bit more under the radar within country music and its sub-genres.

In an effort to grow these artists’ reach, Pittelman and bandmates Elana Redfield and Tami Johnson founded the Gay Ole Opry, a recurring event featuring queer country music acts, in 2011. They also put together Queer Country Quarterly shows, which take place, as the name suggests, each quarter, in Brooklyn, N.Y.; similarly, there’s Queer Country West Coast, spearheaded by Eli Conley, out in the San Francisco Bay Area. And this summer, Pittelman and company organized the Another Country Festival as well, and hope to run it again next year.

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Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

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Noisey interviews Hayley Thompson-King, streams new LP Psychotic Melancholia

A country artist with a serious set of pipes is nothing new, nor is rock-heavy country music with a psychedelic twist. Equal parts Dolly Parton and Jefferson Airplane, Hayley Thompson-King’s solo record Psychotic Melancholia is a poetic and measured critique of life as a woman in the 21st century, but don’t let that turn you off. There’s still plenty of rollicking on this record.

Psychotic Melancholia opens with “Large Hall, Slow Decay” a good-natured single focused on teasing a holy roller who’s found herself on a mission to save King from her sinning ways. With a guitar riff ripped straight from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.,” the song is an energetic introduction to what Thompson-King has repeatedly called her “Sodom and Gomorrah concept album.” As far as a country record goes, that’s is a damn good place as any to kick it off.

Thompson-King was born and raised in Florida, the daughter of “an actual cowboy” (her words) who enjoyed horseback riding and had a knack for finding herself at church-organized events on a quest to figure out exactly what it would take to get sent to hell. At one point, she was a proud member of a group called “Clowns for Christ” an organization that is exactly what you think it is. Eventually she moved to New York, then to Boston, where she earned her master’s degree in Opera Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. She didn’t start out doing the country thing seriously, as the band she helped form in 2012, Banditas, emphasized garage rock and gospel influences more than others. You can still hear some country in a few of the band’s songs, but they’re hidden enough to make Psychotic Melancholia feel that much more like a head-first dive into the genre than a gradual transition.

“I feel that what’s been done to perfect country [music], we could try and get as [close to] perfect as we can” Thompson-King says of the record’s sound, which heavily borrows inspiration from old rock ‘n’ roll and Opera alike, “but whenever I get into that mindset, no one likes it. It doesn’t work for me. So we went this other route with it where we just got really psychedelic.”

Going psychedelic doesn’t always fit on this record. A song like “Teratoma,” for example, where Thompson-King’s opera-trained voice seems restricted to a specific octave and forced to maintain a monotone voice in between each choral refrain feels restricted to the theme instead of enhanced by it, whereas her cover of Dolly Parton’s “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You” probably would have run wild and free with that treatment. “Dopesick,” which was written from Thompson-King’s personal experience of watching a loved one struggle with a heroin addiction, on the other hand, which begins in an eerily similar way to the Parton cover, ends itself with a guitar spot and a wild howl that hints at just how psychedelic this thing could become. It often feels like Thompson-King and company’s music is being reined in when it needs to be allowed to roam freely.

It’s not a record that’s all disappointment and no worthwhile pay off, though. Thompson-King ends it with an Opera song “Wehmut,” which is a German word for “wistfulness,” that’s totally out of left-field and absolutely not in line with the album overall, but Thompson-King’s vocals are so spectacular I’m willing to let it slide. And, as far as concepts go, there’s hardly a better one than Sodom and Gomorrha. They were just trying to have a good time, after all. READ MORE…

 

Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

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PopMatters premieres Fred Wickham’s new single, “Rock Bottom”

Reminiscent of the rambling of folk and country legends like Dylan and Cash, Fred Wickham‘s “Rock Bottom” is a modern bard’s sardonic tale of twists and turns for the worst. It’s all stapled together by the final utterance of its chorus: “You might think you’ve hit rock bottom, but you’ve got a long way to go.”

Despite its cynic’s worldview, the makeup of the song itself feels decidedly upbeat. Wickham’s world-worn perception of the scene his lyrics are painting is adequately met by maundering, folksy vocals. Otherwise, the instrumentation is jaunty, featuring both brass and organ-produced synth that brings more of a playful, sarcastic overtone to the ongoing events laid out in the song.

Wickham’s Mariosa Delta releases on September 29th. READ MORE…

 

Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

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No Depression premieres Tom Irwin’s new single, “I Have Wandered”

Called “a modern day troubadour” by John Stirratt (Wilco), singer-songwriter-musician Tom Irwin has spent a lifetime making music in the Midwest using his long standing (sixth generation) Illinois roots as his base for a world view of a life in the musical arts. On September 8th, Irwin will release his latest record, All That Love, which was produced by Stirratt (who also played on the album), and features esteemed players including Greg Wieczorek on drums, John Pirruccello on 12-string guitar and pedal steel, Scott Ligon (piano, organ, accordion, bass and guitar), Theresa O’Hare (flute), Paul Von Mertens (sax) and Irwin’s hometown band, the Hayburners. The eleven song collection includes tunes recently penned, a few that were written over thirty years ago, and what ever else John and Tom agreed to from the hundreds of original compositions in the prolific songwriter’s back catalog. Today, Irwin shares the second track from the album, “I Have Wandered.” Led by sparkling keys and a swinging rhythm, the buoyant “I Have Wandered” is an introspective tale of personal struggle – “Let me roll and rumble and curse with all my might/And fake and fumble until I get it right/I will stand and stumble and crawl towards sunlight/And take and tumble as long as I can fight” – that’s perfect for the dance floor.

Irwin had this to say about the track, “The second track on All That Love was originally titled, “Let Me,” and once called “‘Til I Get It Right” by my oldest son when he was about eight. Producer-musician John Stirratt of Wilco, kept referring to it as “I Have Wandered,” from the first line of the song, because he didn’t know what else to call it, and the new name stuck. The lyrics kind of came out of nowhere with no real story behind the meaning, though I get flashes of where they came from and what they related to in my life during different moments when I sing the song. Most of the time I have a tale to tell, but this one is a bit more mysterious as to what’s happening or what peculiar struggle the narrator is working through. Perhaps the words describe a fight against convention or a push back to those hoping that this guy will act a certain way that wasn’t particularly what he had in mind. Whatever the meaning, I have sang this song hundreds of times and never get tired of finding out what it means and where it leans.

         Musically based around a G-Am-C, the chord progression that drives Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” those were about the only chords I could play when this one came out. John added a cool chord substitution of a B minor on the refrain, plus a little turnaround in the verse. All I could say was, “That’s neat. Wish I had thought of that,” but that’s Mr. Stirratt’s wonderfully musical brain in action. Then we all thought a whole step modulation would be a grand gesture to finish out the song with a jam and fade on the refrain.

         Scott Ligon of NRBQ played the signature piano part on a 1898 Steinway upright, a house instrument at Wall to Wall Recording in Chicago. First, he asked John if he should play guitar, his main axe, and John suggested the Steinway to great success and shades of Floyd Cramer. Later Scott returned to the studio to overdub the electric guitar solo. John Pirroccello, who worked the pedal steel guitar, owns and operates the Lakland and Hanson guitar company our of Chicago and plays with John in The Autumn Defense. Greg Wieczorek of Norah Jones’ band, and also in The Autumn Defense, does the distinctive swinging drum rhythm, while Brad Floreth of Jacksonville, Illinois added some electric guitar rhythm on his Creston built Tele. I sang the lead vocals and played my Gallagher acoustic, while John added intermittent harmonies later.

Always a crowd and fan favorite, no matter what you call it, this song takes me there to where I’ve wandered time after time. READ MORE

 

Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.

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The Boston Globe interviews Hayley Thompson-King

Hayley Thompson-King

Like many musicians, Hayley Thompson-King is also a collector by nature. Not the grab-anything-not-nailed-down kind of collector, mind you, but the methodical, curatorial type, focused on gathering selectively, in one place, one day at a time, the things she truly loves.

A peek around the 35-year-old singer-songwriter’s Somerville apartment — where she lives as an artist-in-residence through a grant from the city’s arts council and teaches voice lessons in her spare time — reveals countless keepsakes. A horse saddle and belt buckles bring her back to a childhood in Sebastian, Fla., filled with county fairs, riding lessons, and rusted trucks. Dozens of records, strewn in stacks, expose the same obsession with opera that propelled Thompson-King through her undergraduate studies at NYU and a master’s program at the New England Conservatory of Music, both focused on the Romantic art form. At least one of the guitars within view is a relic from her old days in the garage-country group Banditas.

Along one wall, above time-worn tambourines and tape machines, hangs a row of paintings bookended by the Pink Panther (“Actually, that’s the first thing I ever bought when I moved to New York”) and a silhouetted musician lost amid the throes of a since-forgotten symphony (“That picture’s from my mom’s mother, and it looks exactly like my mother”). A clothes rack looms over a scruffy brown couch, crowded by more winter coats than any New Englander would ever need.

Thompson-King’s attraction to artifacts, of all shapes and sizes, may be rooted in her belief that appreciating the past can help you fathom the future. That’s borne out by her musical stylings, a cross between fuzzed-out rock ’n’ roll, classical opera, woozy psychedelia, and honky-tonk that feels at once appealingly old-school and downright experimental.

Across her debut solo LP “Psychotic Melancholia,” out Sept. 1, Thompson-King draws upon her raw yet theatrical voice, as well as influences ranging from Schumann to scripture, to translate uncommonly complex themes (dismantling false idols and revisiting the Old Testament’s treatment of women through a feminist lens are just two) into a soulful, sonic tempest that may well constitute its own genre. Ahead of that release and two Boston shows — a stripped-down set Wednesday at the MFA, and a free album release party at Loretta’s Last Call the next night — Thompson-King sat down to discuss her singular vision. READ MORE…

 

Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.