Katie Knipp – Me
Katie Knipp Publishing
13 tracks – 56 minutes
Katie Knipp grew up in Concord, California. As a young girl she played in the school band playing clarinet, but as a teen she determined she loved to sing and joined the choir. She started private vocal lessons at age 13, taught herself to play piano starting at age 16, and then the guitar in her early 20’s. When Barry Manilow was performing some shows in the Bay area, he contacted her high school to pick some singers to back him at those shows. She was one he selected.
Everyone around her said that making a living in music was an impossible task and suggested she pursue a medical degree. She enrolled in college to earn a degree in anesthesiology, but also chose a choir elective. She quickly found the music was more important to her.
She continued to work with a private vocal coach, Joe Barnett, for eight years and entered into the music program at UC Santa Cruz and finally completed her music degree at Cal State Hayward. She listened a lot to Bonnie Raitt and found that her bluesy, Americana sound was the music she most enjoyed. She formed her own band, playing in local clubs and made several attempts at advancing her music career with recording contracts. She married and moved to Sacramento, where she had to start over. When she had an opportunity to open for Tim Reynolds, it led to a relationship with SBL Entertainment which offered many opportunities for her to open for other musicians including Robert Cray, Joan Osborne and Ruthie Foster among others.
In 2014, she gave birth to the first of two children, the second born a year later. This dropped her career back but also gave her an opportunity to dwell on her music and to consider her future direction. She studied marketing and pre-sales all of which led to the release of the present album, which as titled proclaims “Me”. The album consists of ten original songs, all written by Katie and three shortened radio versions of the earlier full versions.
Katy plays piano, Wurlitzer, electric and acoustic guitars, and dobro as well as singing all lead vocals and providing her own backing vocals on several cuts. Her band consists of Neil Campisano on drums, Chris Martino and Quinn Bridges on lead guitar, Pancho Tomaselli and Jen Rund on bass, Steve Utstein on Hammond organ, electric piano, mellotron and cello, Justin Au on trumpet, Brandon Au on trombone and tuba and several other guest performers.
Katie’s piano opens the album with “Mud”, a slightly theatrically tilted song that announces at the beginning “Surrounded by garbage, perched on a stone, I am trying to write songs that aren’t about you”. She follows that up with “Outlaw Doc”, a rollicking rocker with Mick Martin guesting on harmonica. “Vampire” starts with a haunting rhythm and bounces along as she declares “kill me as you love me, as I am yours until the end.” She declares that I will love you forever through “Time and Space” on a quieter ballad.
It is noted that she wrote “Go” as a seven-part harmony and she dubbed her voice for most of those tracks. Pancho adds vocals on the lower register tracks. She then says, “I Want to Tell You” “that I love you before I die”. “The Devil’s Armchair” is a song dealing with addiction in any of its many forms including obsessive love, substance abuse, or electronics and notes that “when you sink into the devil’s armchair, you experience a moment of bliss”. Pancho and Sam Miranda add a verse in Spanish.
Her bio cites a friendship she formed with Josh Dadami, a young man in her high school years, with whom she formed a friendship and wrote some of her earliest songs. He had cystic fibrosis and died at age 26 from the disease, which she learned about when she received a call from his mother while she was performing and listened to a voice mail. “Dirty Cables” recounts her recollection of him. “Lava Pot” finds her “in over my head”. “Stillness” is a somber song opening with the sounds of gun shots and dealing with murders that have occurred in the name of racism or prejudice. The album concludes with the radio edits of “Mud”, “Go” and “Lava Pot”
Katie’s voice has a unique, sometimes warbly, quality that some might find difficult to appreciate. As I noted at the beginning of the song reviews, all of her songs have a theatrical flair that might bring to mind some of the songs from 70’s female icons such as Ani DiFranco. While certainly instrumentally interesting, the style is all over the place but in my mind, seldom centered in the blues. The eccentric sound is one of her own.
