Kate Isenberg

"One of the best CDs of 2010." - INDIE ACOUSTIC PROJECT

Kate Isenberg's new CD, "THE TIME COMES ON HUMMING TRACKS" (2007), has been chosen by senior editor Teja Gerken for "What the AG Editors Are Spinning," a selection of the very best in new acoustic music. (May 2007 issue) - ACOUSTIC GUITAR magazine

Through lyrics jumping with references to fireflies and lovesickness, Kate Isenberg rides in on her third effort, The Time Comes on Humming Tracks. From her dripping sentimentality and intricate guitar work, Isenberg’s songs call to mind dreamy songwriters like Laura Veirs; and like Veirs, Isenberg’s material is rooted in natural imagery — April showers, melting ice, “grey turf,” streams and skies.

On “Streetcar to Grace,” she challenges the saying “All roads lead to Rome,” tying it, in some slightly confusing way, to having been done wrong. Isenberg is looking for the truth here, and continues to do so even after the song meets its imperfect end (her guitar cuts out in an arrhythmic way, while the drums keep pounding their battle march into the fade).

On “James,” a tune beckoning home a lost love, the narrator is driven to an ice cream stand, asking the question, “How could love go and leave me all alone with only a jingle man to ask me how I am?” “She Knows” focuses on telling the truth as Isenberg sings through all the things she’d like to tell the song’s subject: “If I ... never take a stand and tell her ... how I love the way she interrupted my soliloquy, [I’ll] make sure she knows.”

On “Fireflies,” guitar harmonics jump around like little dancing bugs, as Isenberg sings about missing the truth altogether in a relationship (“How blind was I”). On this track, slide whistle, shaker and the fits and starts of Isenberg’s guitar work especially well together, showcasing one of the most impressive arrangements on the album.
It’s this sort of instrumentation that makes Isenberg’s work so infectious. If there is a downside to The Time Comes..., it is in the somewhat non-emotive arc of Isenberg’s voice. More nuances between her “soft singing” and “singing hard” would make these songs soar even higher. This is, however, a small detractor from the album’s impeccable songwriting. (Three Roads Records)

-Kim Ruehl - PERFORMER magazine

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.

- SAN FRANCISCO VOICE

All Music Guide has awarded Kate Isenberg's 2007 release, THE TIME COMES ON HUMMING TRACKS, with a prestigious five-star rating, the highest honor awarded by the industry-standard rating system. - ALL MUSIC GUIDE

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.

Q: Tell us about your work.

A: 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.

Q: What has been your greatest success? Setback?

A: 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.

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

A: 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.

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

A: 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. - SAN FRANCISCO VOICE

The Indie Acoustic Project, a U.S.-based organization that culls the best acoustic recordings from around the world for its annual best-of contest, has named Kate Isenberg's album THE TIME COMES ON HUMMING TRACKS as a finalist for the honor of Best Album of 2007 in the female-singer-songwriter category.

The IAP's distinguished winners list from recent years' contests includes Greg Brown, Allison Krauss, Vienna Teng, Kaki King, Catie Curtis, and Nickel Creek. This year's list of finalists also includes Cary Brothers, David Grisman, and Steve Earle. - INDIE ACOUSTIC PROJECT

Exquisite production spotlights this out Bay Area singer-songwriter's fresh, sparkling voice and intricate guitar arrangements while painting aural nignettes of urban lesbian life and love, as in the opening "Streetcar to Grace." --Eds. - CURVE magazine

Kate Isenberg's debut album, "The Time Comes On Humming Tracks," is an excellent record. Her easy flowing, literate lyrics fly above her often intricate guitar work. I first discovered her work when asked to review her CD for another publication, and was so impressed with the album that I had to include her on this list.

Apparently, I'm not the only one paying attention, as Isenberg has since received great press from "The San Francisco Chronicle" and "Bitch" magazine, to name a few. Currently, her only dates are in the Bay Area, but that's sure to change as more people find out about her music, which calls to mind the work of Laura Veirs and some of Michell Shocked's early work ("Anchored Down in Anchorage," for example). --Kim Ruehl, "Folk" section editor, About.com - ABOUT.COM

Feel like a good story? Bay Area native Kate Isenberg proves that the form is alive and well on "The Time Comes on Humming Tracks." Isenberg's affecting collection of acoustic vignettes deals primarily with reminiscences and regrets, and she tells them with alluring imagery and a charming, plainspoken delivery similar to Suzanne Vega's. "Time's a fearless foe with whom to play a childish chicken game," Isenberg observes over warm currents of mandolin on the gently rolling opener, "Streetcar to Grace"; it's a theme she revisits with intriguing detail throughout the CD, on departed-friend tribute "Celia" and the radiant "Coming Home," a nostalgic meditation that pulses and sparks with the intricate interplay of guitar, violin, train-track percussion, and multitracked vocals. A soft-spoken marvel of a recording. --Todd Lavoie - SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN