Celebrating music, the arts, and wellness for 14 years, this coming weekend is Kingston’s O+ Festival. This year’s line-up features an impressive array of artists and, on Saturday night, takes it up to the next level with Kate Pierson at the Old Dutch. The B-52s’ vocalist has a brand-new solo album, Radios and Rainbows, an ear-catching collection with both groove and heart.
Pierson was kind enough to chat about her current work, The B-52s, and how she came to call Woodstock home. What follows is excerpted from a longer interview:
Adam Snyder: Firstly, I love your new album, Radios and Rainbows, which just released on September 20th.
Kate Pierson: Oh, thank you.
AS: The first single is Evil Love, a great song with a dark theme. It seems like you’re in a pretty good place right now, so how did “Evil Love” come about? Are some of the songs on Radios and Rainbows sort of like short stories?
KP: Well, yes, they are short stories. Some of the songs on there are very confessional almost, or autobiographical. That’s one aim I had doing a solo record, to sing songs that were more, you know, personal and heartfelt.
But when you write a song, the intention sometimes doesn’t match the actual song that comes out. For “Evil Love”, I went into a writing session with Bleu McAuley who is a really great songwriter and producer, he’s got a great laugh to boot. We wanted to write a song about forgiveness, and we were listing kinds of love, and I said “Evil Love”, and he goes, ‘That’s it!’ So this whole story developed, just popped out of me. I don’t really feel that way, although I guess within us all there’s an urge for revenge somewhere.
It’s so much fun to sing it, ’cause it just brings out a character that you can do. I really feel it when I sing it, it’s very dramatic. The rest of the songs, you know, are very positive, some sort of anthemic, almost.
AS: Radios and Rainbows is a great showcase for your distinctive voice. There’s kind of a wide variety of musical styles, can you talk about how it was produced?
KP: Well, they’re produced by all different people, there’s no one producer. Each one was written with a different co-writer.
Some of the songs that were written a little while ago, we kind of pulled the tracks together and had to figure out who would produce each one, basically. And then I had someone remix some of the songs, and some of the songs I had to re-record.
I’ve always so admired Beck, when he first came out with his record that had a country song and all. Everyone’s like, Oh, all the songs are so different, and I just love that, because people don’t listen that way anymore. Unless they get the vinyl and they want to sit down and, you know, have their hair blown back by the speakers.
AS: In addition to the eclectic nature, there’s also a difference between having somewhat of a backing band, and the dynamic interplay of a band in which each person has their own distinct musical voice. This is especially true with The B-52s. In all honesty without exaggeration, your band is one of the most dynamic bands that has ever existed. Please talk about this utterly magical combination of talents. How did you do it?
KP: With The B-52s, we know each other so well, but when we started, it was totally without intention to start a band, we just started jamming one night. And it came about that we wrote a song together.
AS: What was the first song?
KP: The first song was a song called “Killer Bees” that we never finished, really, or recorded, or put out, but we do have a recording, I mean we have a personal recording but…
AS: God, I would love to hear that song.
KP: It was a really funny song, the first of many disaster songs, songs about volcanoes, but this was, you know, killer bees coming up from South America. And that was the theme, and there was a chorus which involved some buzzing sounds.
We had so much fun jamming. And that set a template for the way The B-52s write together which is, for the most part, collective jamming, and piecing together. It’s like a collage, the pieces of a jam. So that’s really why it’s so unique.
AS: How do you avoid singing over each other? Sometimes it’s like you’re in dialogue but not, you know, in a strictly predictable way. How do you figure that kind of thing out?
KP: Cindy and I always naturally hit on the harmonies. We take the harmonies from the jam, and we’re all singing at the same time, and sometimes we can’t even hear what the other person is singing…I mean, I guess you do hear something, but somehow it all fits together, and we pick the parts.
We do overlap with Fred in a background sort of way, there’s a lot of back-and-forth. There are parts where we do all sing at once, but in an organized sort of way.
AS: There’s also the way your keys perfectly compliment Ricky’s guitar and things like that, I just wonder how you arrived at that?
KP: Well, Ricky’s guitar playing was just magical. And Keith’s drumming, he and Ricky just locked in. Sometimes they would also be jamming on the music instrumentation. Sometimes they would have an idea of the instrumentation, and we’d jam with that, kind of, be playing something they wrote beforehand, sort of.
And then after Ricky passed away Keith took over guitar, he did all the instrumentation himself. And then we would jam basically to what he wrote. But a lot of times he would think, oh, this is the chorus, that would be the verse, then once we jammed on it, we’d switched everything around, and what became the song sort of wasn’t that predictable.
AS: Back to your own music apart from The B-52s, before the last big election, you made a video, which I think maybe was even made in Kingston? It was an incredibly powerful song called “The Great Invisible Wall”.
KP: Oh, yeah!
AS: I was hoping it would be on your solo album. Can you please talk about this song, and also the power of music to inspire people to stand up for what they feel is right.
KP: Well, I really feel that it’s a responsibility of these musicians, or anyone that has a voice, to try to at least express that, and if it influences people, then great. But at least to be able to speak out.
When I wrote “The Great Invisible Wall”, it’s just something I’d had rattling around in my head, I had, like, two songs almost, and then all of a sudden it just clicked, when the whole thing with the wall was, you know, the wall, the wall, and I just thought well this is really not just a physical wall, it’s this invisible wall that keeps us apart.
And, you know, I was thinking about the border, and I invited Aleks Syntek who’s a really big artist in Mexico to sing the Spanish parts.
He had reached out to us and recorded something with The B-52s for a record he’s still to put out, he recorded different songs with different 80s heroes of his, and he’s working on a movie and everything.
Anyway, I wrote this song and I asked him to sing on it in Spanish, and then he kinda rewrote the verse. He actually did a video for it, besides that performance we did at the Brickyard. I didn’t put it on the record, I just kinda wanna put it out, maybe with Aleks, or I don’t know if it’s gonna be on his record, or in his movie.
AS: Speaking of the Kingston area, the release of your new album coincides with your headline show as part of O Positive. You’ve lived in the area since I think the late 80s, do you still live here part time?
KP: Most of the time, yeah. We sold Lazy Meadows. My wife, Monica, ran that for years and she was like, I have to get out of this hospitality business. So we decided to sell it, and when we did we bought the place on the Cape. And it’s great, we’ve been spending a lot of the summer on the Cape, but I go back-and-forth and, mainly we’re in Woodstock.
AS: Did you start recording here first? Is that what introduced you to the area?
KP: Well, after Ricky died, Laura Levine, who’s a rock photographer that lives in Woodstock, invited Keith and I up, and our friend Robert Waldrop who co wrote some songs with us, he wrote the lyrics to “Roam” and a bunch of other B-52s songs.
When the band first left Athens, we got a house together in Lake Mahopac. And once we saw Woodstock, we were like, why didn’t we come to Woodstock? Keith decided to rent a house, then he bought a house. I bought a little cabin in 1987 and then I built a house in 2000. I love it, love the mountains, and now we have mountains and the sea, which is just the best.
I just love that the whole area is, you know, so accessible. Kingston, Hudson, going to Saugerties, to The Local, or going to Rhinebeck. There’s just something happening in each town, it’s all so accessible. But Woodstock’s really, you know, I feel like home.
This year’s O+ festival also features Neko Case and over 50 other performers, in addition to brand-new murals and wellness clinics. It’s a great way to support your local community. For a complete schedule, see the O+ website, where wristbands are available on a sliding scale. Everyone can afford to go to O Positive. Get set up at opositivefestival.org.
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