San Fran Voice

Kate Isenberg is an amazing local singer-songwriter who has been working hard to carve out a career for herself in the creative arts. Hopefully you got a chance to check out my review of her recent CD release, The Time Comes on Humming Tracks. In this interview, Kate tells us about her work and gives us more insight into that CD.

Tell us about your work.

My work in the arts is multi-faceted, reflecting three major areas of interest: music, illustration, and writing. Currently, music is the pursuit I devote my after-work resources to, though that has shifted before and will likely shift again.

What do you enjoy most about your career? What do you do dislike?

It’s varied—and it’s varied. Being an artist with more than one passionate interest and facility, I enjoy several modes of expression. But having more than one focus can make it hard to devote the time and energy required to become an expert in one field, let alone market a work of fiction, a CD, or a portfolio of drawings.

What has been your greatest success? Setback?

My greatest success, in general terms, has been to carve out a life that allows me to continue pursuing my arts at a serious level. Our culture makes this hard, since the arts don’t often pay enough to live on until one is very successful, which may be years down the road, if ever. My greatest setback seemed, at first, to be my decision to step away from magazine editing, several years ago. After working very hard for five years for national magazines, it seemed a shame to not step up on that ladder, which I was prepared to do, from a resume standpoint. But stepping away from that world forced me to commit to my artistic endeavors more seriously. And, in the end, it clarified what does compel me about journalism, such as reviewing books.

What are some favorite projects you’ve completed and why?

This year, I released my third collection of original songs, a CD called “The Time Comes on Humming Tracks.” Unlike my previous two records, this one was mixed and mastered by professional sound engineers to match the sound quality of any album you’d hear on the radio or in a music store. But this CD also has a special place for me personally because it’s the first complete work I’ve released that feels artistically realized. I composed the arrangements myself—a huge pleasure and challenge—and recorded most of the tracks myself, at home on my computer with a set of good microphones. I’ve always been fascinated by multi-track audio, ever since I first borrowed a 4-track Tascam analog tape recorder, in 1996. On that Tascam, I experimented with layering vocal harmonies and guitar lines on top of each other, and I saw the possibilities an artist could have—given some technical know-how and a lot of patience—to create a complex and rich sound scape. New-folk indie artists like Sam Beam, of Iron and Wine, reflect this; Sufjan Stevens takes it to a symphonic level. During my ten years or so as a songwriter, I’ve always wanted to create a collection of original songs that were sonically richer than the solo guitar and voice aesthetic that, by necessity, I’ve most often performed with. It’s not just about more harmonies, more guitars, more instruments. With today’s digital multi-tracking capabilities (much more advanced than that Tascam’s), it’s very easy to layer tons of audio tracks on top of one another. The best songwriters and arrangers out there, in my opinion, are the ones who use every track in service of the song’s particular aesthetic, its unique “backstory.” What I was after with this album was not a technical stunt, but an artistic goal: to find the combination of guitar, mandolin, piano, bass, drums, harmonies, and (in one instance) slide flute to capture the essence of each song, and the essence of my songwriting approach.

What are some of your personal and/or professional goals for the future?

I hope to increase the amount of time I’m able to devote to my arts. This is a funding question, in large part, and requires that eventually the art pay for more of its own development. More time means more opportunity to devote myself to my craft, and to specific goals: another full-length CD, a longer work of fiction, a collection of my comic strips, for example. All of these are laborious endeavors with a necessary quota of unproductive time: time to daydream, time to be a novice, time for false starts. Then the productive time can begin, with more exploration and fool’s errands along the way. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the time required to market artistic works in our media-saturated society. Marketing is essential to making an income from the art, though. So it follows that time—as much of it as possible—is necessary for any serious artistic pursuit, let alone three.