Kate Van Horn

Singer-songwriter Kate Van Horn exerts a patent but subtle power in her performance and songwriting. She entices listeners into her inner space with clear and expressive melodies, intriguing lyrics, and vibe-heavy, piano-centric textures. Van Horn was born in San Francisco, grew up in southwestern Connecticut and now lives in the heart of California wine country. She began playing piano at age six, and singing and playing at twelve, when Tori Amos’ 1992 album, Little Earthquakes, worked its transformative magic. “Looking back, it was a critical point for me,” Van Horn says. “It freed me within the pop form; Tori made me realize you don’t have to be literal.”

Amos’ influence seeped into her style, evident in the way Van Horn creates dark piano spaces for her satiny voice to draw around, and in the way she revisits phrases like “way out here” in the song old feeling, changing it each time she sings it, so you never know if she’s headed up or down. There’s an insistence to that particular song – the first track on her just-released independent album Truce – a steady pulse from the bass and drums, the piano clamoring as her voice rises, hesitant-to-strong: “I thought I shared one new feeling / but I was wrong / it’s an old feeling / nobody is feeling what I’m feeling.” Her voice, at times delicate and at others full of attitude and awareness, mirrors our own vacillating emotions as we weather the array of complexities life presents.

Her songwriting is at once refreshingly original and yet also instantly classic, with lyrics like “it’s easy to be happy when you’re here / so many troubles do disappear / traded for new troubles, yes, my dear” on the song easy. “My songs are more experience-based,” Van Horn says. “I’m inspired to write based on what I feel intensely in a given moment, and then experiences filter through language and music and a patchwork of themes emerges.” Those themes include that of the faithful warrior on love and war, as her transcendent voice climbs, singing, “making believe that forevermore nothing bad will happen…we keep marching.” The song pillow wish is an urgent waltz-gone-pop containing stark observations such as “yet another morning / and where are we / what have we done?” After that particular lyric, Kate’s sure soprano and sweet piano suddenly vanish in a moment of silence, readily illustrating the level of attention to detail she pays when writing and performing her songs.

She attributes her high standards to her “Great Books” education at Shimer College and her singing skills to the “twenty or so” opera and voice lessons she took in 2006 at Blue Bear School of Music in San Francisco. Kate is comfortable in the upper registers, where she is really able to let her raw emotions loose. During the song lucky i am, we feel as if we are eavesdropping as she sings, poignantly, to herself, “you’re afraid of wanting / ‘cause it leads right to taking / which…just leads back to wanting.” The piano notes here fall weightily like fat drops down a windowpane. Van Horn sometimes wraps other sad topics in an upbeat package that’s part Joni Mitchell and part show-tune, like in the song dismal day, where Kate sings resignedly, “I knew I couldn’t trust those clouds.”

Van Horn says she was fortunate to find such “amazing musical colorists” – fellow California musicians Vic Carberry on drums, Jeff Martin on bass and strings, and Roxanne Oliva on accordion and harp – to accompany her on her debut album, Truce, which Kate says has been “long in coming.” Here, finally, is a collection that captures Van Horn’s dynamic range, her shifting, allegorical perspectives and her subtle power.