San Fran Voice

Imagine that it is the end of winter in a place that has four typical seasons. You are in your apartment, wearing fuzzy pajamas and a warm robe. Outside of your window, the wind stirs up the chill but the true harshness of winter has already subsided. You have just gotten over your winter cold, and you feel happy just to feel well. You are curled up on your favorite chair, your hands wrapped around a mug of hot tea. It’s dark tea, with a rich smoky flavor and you’ve accented it with a spill of cream and a dash of honey. You take the first sip, and the chill of winter fades away. You feel healthy and warm, not quite ready for spring but content to just sit at the end of winter in the comfort of this moment. Hold on to this feeling. This is the feeling of Kate Isenberg’s new CD The Time Comes On Humming Tracks.

The lyrics of the ten tracks on this CD hold in perfect balance this moment between winter and spring. They tacitly acknowledge that life is filled with winters … that there are difficulties in relationships, that there are complications within each of us, that there will sometimes be a chill in the air. But they flow along with the knowledge that there is spring beyond every winter, that there is possibility within people and their relationships, that there will always be warm cups of tea to ward away the cold. This idea can be summed up by a line in the first track (“Streetcar to Grace”) which conveys simple truth: “I think I may be lost: the first step to found”.

If Kate’s music is the feeling of warm tea enjoyed on a late winter day, her voice is the honey which laces that tea. It is the light sweetness that stands out amidst the smoky depths of her lyrics and her instrumentals. Those instrumentals are like the strong herbs of the drink. The Time Comes on Humming Tracks is filled with a number of different sounds – piano, mandolin, banjo. This is not a tea that has been watered down. But through these rich intricacies, Kate’s voice brings sweetness. You may drink the tea for the warmth, but you enjoy it for the honey.

You want to know who else Kate sounds like, don’t you? That’s the information most people seek from CD reviews. Well, she sounds like herself. But if I got pinned down, I’d explain that she has the indie-folk sound of singers established in that genre. She sounds like Indigo Girls on songs like “Galileo”, like Lucinda Williams on her less country-ish songs, like Beth Hart when her voice peaks on “L.A. Song”. But these comparisons matter less than the feeling that you’re left with when you’re listening to Kate’s CD in the comfort of your own apartment, knowing that all winters end.

Kate’s a local singer-songwriter and she’ll be performing in the city on August 17th at El Rio. You can preview her music on her MySpace page and her website (and you can get info on downloading or ordering the CD from those spots as well). And keep your eye on our site because we’ve got an excerpt from an interview with Kate coming up in the next couple of weeks.