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The Boot praises Katie Jo’s new single “Pawn Shop Queen,” an anthem for perseverance

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Singer-songwriter Katie Jo‘s debut album, Pawn Shop Queen, chronicles some of the most traumatic experiences of her young life. Its title track, however, offers a bit of optimism: a reminder that our worst moments don’t define us, but make us stronger.
 
Jo describes “Pawn Shop Queen”—which is premiering exclusively on The Boot—as “an anthem for resisting the lies depression tells us about ourselves … for perseverance in spite of one’s self.” She’d had the title in her mind for a song for quite some time, and by the time she sat down to write it, at home in her pajamas, it took less than an hour.

“It’s the sound of someone mustering the energy to regain their self confidence, a statement to myself that trauma and heartbreak alone don’t define who I am,” Jo reflects. “At the time, I was not only processing the fallout of some pretty shocking infidelity in my relationship, but also trauma around my own reproductive health and infertility. I felt betrayed, both by my partner and my own sense of worth.”
 

GoldenOak

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GoldenOak – Room To Grow (out June 25th)

With harmonies derived only from the genetic intricacies of a brother-sister duo, Zak and Lena Kendall have evolved from homespun, family-oriented folk music to deliver roots-revival styled sophistication for a hyper-conscious generation. The Kendalls, beloved within their quickly expanding fandom as GoldenOak, were raised in part by the western Maine landscape.

GoldenOak began as two children playing around backyard bonfires and was more firmly established with their 2016 debut, Pleasant St. In response to their coming-of-age chronicle, Dispatch Magazine coined the duo “one of Portland’s most important upcoming bands.” As purveyors of age-old tradition sharing contemporary messaging, the pair has landed spots on stage with Lady Lamb, The Dustbowl Revival, The Ghost of Paul Revere, and The Mallett Brothers Band.

Following their most recent project, Foxgloves—named ‘EP of the year’ by the Portland Music Awards—their sophomore full-length, Room to Grow is GoldenOak’s most cohesive collection yet. 

Creating Room to Grow felt like a research project. Instead of turning research into a critical analysis, Zak produced an analytical work of art backed by empyreal folk music. As a student of human ecology in college, his songwriting contains front-line accounts of the current situation. 

“Art isn’t a dumbed-down version of climate issues,” he says. “It’s okay that I’m not writing a book. There’s a place for music and art in climate conversations, and turning research data into art still does these ideas justice because that’s an important way to convey information and knowledge to push these issues to the forefront and make positive change.”

“Falter,” Zak’s pride-point as a songwriter, details the uniquely human quality of corruption. Reminiscent of a late 1960s protest tune, the track perpetuates the irony of political money etching its name in geological history and the implications of the most privileged people continuing to expand their carbon footprint, endangering less responsible populations in more fragile ecosystems. 

“It was a crazy process of learning and rethinking my songwriter knowledge, avoiding a crutch,” says Zak. In that vein, his approach developed in a new way, putting himself in the path of inspiration rather than his previous practice of awaiting a brilliant spark to overcome him. This meant reshaping an intentional process-focused style of songwriting. 

“I had this romanticized view that the song would take me to where it wants to be rather than me pushing the song to where it should be,” he explains. “I think I almost had too much faith in the song.”

Zak and Lena recorded the album at Monico Studios—a repurposed barn situated between rolling farmland outside of Portland. GoldenOak began wrapping up sessions the week Maine saw its first case of novel coronavirus. They did not return to the studio until June to add vocal overdubs, leaving several weeks for contemplation. 

“It was an interesting time to bring my mind back to that place we started when the pandemic now consumed everything,” says Zak. “I had difficulty not writing the pandemic into the record. As much as I thought about that, it wasn’t the path that we started on, so it shouldn’t be where we ended.”

The product is an inclusive call to action. Putting fears and facts to song, rather than tucked away in private corners of academia, provides greater accessibility to the public, those more vulnerable to the implications. Engineered by Ryan Ordway and Dan Capaldi, mixed by Ordway and Sam McArthur, and mastered by Adam Ayan, GoldenOak’s second studio album is a kinetic tribute to the untamed nature of climate change.  

“Only One” encapsulates climate anxiety. An anthem for the people on the front-lines of the fight for our planet tackles burnout and feelings of helplessness or solitude in battle. At the end of the bridge, the track glistens with Forrest Tripp’s trombone-induced kaleidoscopic imagery. Lena hopes the delicately balanced soundscape reminds friends and listeners of what they’re fighting for.

Bassist Mike Knowles and drummer Jackson Cromwell add levity to Zak’s guitar and Lena’s clarinet. The orchestral set paints an ethereal portrait of nature’s beauty, offsetting the impending doom behind their lyrical findings. 

Lena’s brazen vocal offerings from “Little Light ” upend the ‘Doom’s Day’ darkness of the album, alleviating the defeatism that threads throughout the diagnostic tracklist. Zak and Lena sat down on the last night of the project to pen one of the few songs they co-wrote on the album. Dan Capaldi’s chugging percussion suggests the journey is just beginning, but Christian Bertelsen’s bright trumpet contribution celebrates the distance covered and hope ahead. 

“It sheds light on both ancient answers, looking to the past and how can we move forward, and to the future at things like renewable energy,” says Lena. Zak adds, “Indigenous people in the US have been living sustainably for forever. And we need to look to them to be the leaders of this because they have a lot of answers.”

The album closes with the title-track, which hits home for the mid-twenty-something artists as a more frequently discussed topic. “It’s an intense feeling when you find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, somebody you want to have children with,” Zak explains. 

“But with this research or the social justice issues highlighted this year, and the pandemic, sometimes I feel like ‘how could you even think about bringing kids into this world?’ I probably will not die from climate change because I’m privileged and I live in the United States, but it will seriously impact my children’s lives.”

Somewhere, buried in damning data, is a glimmer of hope—despite the present challenges, society is still looking for room to grow. Zak says, “I’m never going to give up looking for hope, for an answer to this question. I’ll always seek that space for my unborn child to thrive in a world.”

GoldenOak’s new album is due June 25th. GoldenOak hopes to reconnect with their fans in the New England festival circuit this summer, the hallowed ground where the duo first found their footing. Their entrance single, “Islands,” will introduce the concept collection on April 2nd, setting the tone ahead of symbiotic duo’s Room to Grow. 

“This record contains several reasons to fight climate change,” says Lena. “But overall, it’s about continuing to find the reasons why, and here are the stories we can learn from. Room To Grow reminds us that there is a way forward.”

Two Cent Revival

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TWO CENT REVIVAL – DEMONS

Between the dusty, desert noir of its verses and its cascading post-rock chorus, Two Cent Revival’s single “Crow” transitions suddenly from a Southwestern border feel reminiscent of Calexico or Ennio Morricone to the pulsing, arena-ready art-rock of Radiohead, The National, and Arcade Fire. In that way, “Crow” is a perfect orientation for a listener embarking on Demons, Two Cent Revival’s 11-song collection of surprising, narrative folk rock.

There’s a lot going on under the hood of Matt Jones’ unlabored Americana songcraft and his baritone delivery. Adopted from Brazil and raised primarily in Houston, Texas by American parents, Jones’ perspective as a Latino-American is ever-present in his writing, as is the looming specter of Jones’ lifelong struggles with depression and anxiety. Throughout Demons, Jones explores both the nuances of his multicultural identity and his mental health issues, while stylistically maintaining a balance between haunted old-world source material and a contemporary sense of selfhood and style play. The end result is an organic, complex, and unpredictable sound all his own.  

The guiding light of Tom Waits hovers over Demons as it does over essentially all progressive roots music of the last 35 years. Jones, however, approaches his subjects with a gravity and formality more in line with the raw narrative finesse of Nick Cave than the carnivalesque surrealism of Waits. Magical realism and mystical imagery pervade these stories of outlaws and obsessions. Dramatic personae and unfiltered confession take turns at the microphone until finally they are indistinguishable. Demons conjures a timeless, insular world of dark folk myth without conceding to the stylized and the retro. Sonically, Jones takes influences ranging from Langhorne Slim and Shovels & Rope to Beirut & The Decemberists, wringing out their most affecting qualities and distilling them into a unique, powerful blend of expressive folk-rock.

The spare and restrained, “Candy” rocks in ways moody and raw as it introduces Demons recurrent themes of obsession and compulsion. With its Biblical parallelism and its aching prettiness, “Happy Hell” advances the thematic dualities that lie at the heart of the record. The stumbling saloon swing of “It Looks Like Blood to Me” (a stylistic sweet spot revisited on “Violins”) disguises one of the record’s most topical and pointed songs.

Demons is a record of musical and lyrical paradoxes—light and dark, design and chance—embodied in the title of the lavishly produced centerpiece “I’m Being Used,” where the meaning of “used” pivots between “exploited” and “put to a higher purpose.” 

Two simple and elegant love songs provide Demons’ purest affirmations—the gentle, spacious brush groove of “Julia” and the soaring, roots-ethereal anthem “Dose of Grace.” But it is the brass quintet hidden in the album-closing, Klezmer-inspired title track that epitomizes the paradoxical aesthetic of this collection—unwaveringly solid and thematically focused songcraft shot through with extravagant moments of musical imagination and development.

Balancing earthy simplicity with flights of baroque chamber-folk is much easier said than done, and much credit goes to the team Jones assembled for the sessions. The wizardly keyboard work of Brain Axford provides many of Demons’ sheerest moments of musicality. Bassist Tom Welsch and electric guitarist Elijah Tucker play with moody restraint, melodic imagination, and an on-point sense of style and reference throughout, while producer Dan Davine keeps things grounded on drums. It’s a strange world where a guy you meet on the street in Kingston just happens to have an album like this in the can, a work of startling maturity, depth, and acute musical imagination. It is indeed a strange world.