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Salsa Xalel 3:580:00/3:58
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Salsa Xalel 3:580:00/3:58
Katherine Perkins
Katherine Perkins is a Maine-born, Maine-based singer-songwriter, painter and musician. Her songs reflect the ragged windy coast she grew up on, the steadily shifting light and the stark seasonality of an island community in the far northeast reaches of the United States. After graduating from Bennington College in 2011, Perkins cut her musical teeth in Brooklyn, New York, performing with a cohort of fellow Maine transplants in the debaucherous basement rock band Harvey Eyeballs, led by her high school classmate and bestie Fox Schwach. With many of the same musicians (with less distortion and more clothes on) Perkins formed her own sister project, Rose Hips & Ships. Both projects helped Perkins to shape her musical voice –– in the giddy release of Harvey Eyeballs and the rich textures and sincerity of Rose Hips & Ships, she found aspects of the self she wanted to be in her songs. In both bands, collaboration was key. As the leader of Rose Hips & Ships, Perkins released two albums: The Seafarer, in 2013, and The Colors Now, in 2020, following her move back to her hometown in Maine with her partner, saxophonist and composer Danny Fisher-Lochhead. Her new record, Being Younger, will be released on June 21st, 2024.
Being Younger
Coming June 21
The songs on this album are poetic personal reflections on the extended weird time we’ve been living in, and on the search for light around the edges. It’s an album about getting older, about making peace with past failures, about saying goodbye to various youthful fantasies about how things would turn out.
It’s also an album about finding solidarity and friendship amidst the wild weather of these times. One of the great things about getting older is the deepening of old friendships and many of these songs are written as love letters to dear friends, trying to help pull them through tough moments. A couple songs are trying out that level of compassion on myself. Generally they’re calls for togetherness in a time of isolation; they’re songs about pain with hope and light at their core.
We recorded all ten songs in a three-day marathon session in Portland, Maine in August 2022. It was a miracle of logistics; old bandmates had come in from New York and Louisiana and Massachusetts and Amsterdam; we all stayed focused, nobody got covid and we recorded everything that we intended to. At some point in the recording studio I looked around the room and realized that I’d been friends with everyone there for at least ten years, collaborating with many of them since high school band class. I think you can hear those old bonds come through in the music; there’s elation at getting to play together again, after spending two forever pandemic years apart.