Client Press
Karen and the Sorrows’ Karen Pittelman Interviewed by The Bluegrass Situation
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.
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.
Karen and the Sorrows’ Karen Pittelman Shares ’10 Queer Country Artists Country Music Fans Should Know’ with The Boot
“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.
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.
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.
The Boston Globe interviews 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.
MAGNET Magazine streams new LP Recluse in Plain Sight from Johnny Dango
On September 1, Johnny Dango will release Recluse In Plain Sight. The Austin-based singer/songwriter has been a member of Brothers & Sisters and the Memphis Strange and a sideman for Stoney LaRue, but now he’s going out on his own with his solo debut. Says Dango, “A not-so-secret hope is that other musicians might potentially somehow hear it and be inspired to take more chances with their own work, to not play it so safe all the time. I don’t feel like I’m doing anything new here. These songs are all kind of throwbacks to other, more elegant eras. But, they’re sounds I wanted to hear paired with the words and melodies I had bouncing around in my head. So I made a record of it.” Dango will do an acoustic tour in support of Recluse In Plain Sight this fall, then, he says, “I’ll lay low and hopefully write some new stuff in the winter. I’ve got another record coming out in January, so I’ll be touring to support that.” In the meantime, check out Recluse In Plain Sightbelow. We are proud to premiere the album today on magnetmagazine.com. Says Dango of the LP, “I hope it’s a fun little record for anyone who bothers to give it a listen. We tried to keep it fairly short, since attention spans aren’t what they used to be. I don’t expect it to inspire anyone to go out and register to vote or volunteer to help the hungry or mentally ill, but that would be a nice development, wouldn’t it? It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but I like it. Mick Jagger said that, and I’m repeating it over and over again. Because it’s the truth.” 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.