Lovers

Never was a band so perfectly named as Lovers. As we talked over coffee last week about their new album, A Friend in the World, and upcoming national tour, a fan from England who happened to overhear the coffeeshop conversation stopped by the table to warmly great the artists. That's typical for the Portland electro-pop trio, who compare their performances as community celebrations akin to weddings and say they're far too sincere and loving to be a "cool" band. Their dreamy beats make for excellent dancing, but after the sweaty, sweaty shows, the friendly musicians always make time for heart-to-hearts with fans who stop by the merch table.

The band—Emily Kingan, Kerby Ferris, and Carolyn Berk—describe their new album as a fusion of "intimacy and empowerment" with "a modern atmosphere of honesty, new feminist humor, and rhythmic complexity." As a listener, I'd just call it a good time.

Lovers also made Bitch a special mixtape of music that they listened to while making A Friend in the World—check it out at the bottom of this interview.

SARAH MIRK: Can you tell me about the process of making the new album? Where did it come from exactly?

EMILY KINGAN: Some of the songs are three years old, but also some of them we were writing right up until the minute we were recording them.

Oh really? Your music has a lot going on but it also feels really tight. Do you actually plan it out precisely beforehand or do you write it on the fly and riff off each other a lot while you're recording?

KERBY: I would say the riffs are mostly vocal and rhythmic. But with the instruments, with very few exceptions, we worked on intensively for months beforehand.

EMILY: We had what we called Band Camp, where we met every day for a month and hammered out details. I'm a tax person, so it started on April 16th and went all the way until we started recording in late May.

You're a tax preparer? That must be useful to have in the band.

KERBY FERRIS: Incredibly.

CAROLYN BERK: Emily does a shit ton of work.

KERBY: Money can be so confusing with bands, trying to budget for things you need and still take care of yourselves on tour. Emily is incredible about collecting our resources and managing them.

EMILY: Well thank you.

CAROLYN: It's true! You're the one disciplined thinker.

I was just talking to JD Samson and was surprised to hear honestly how hard it is for even musicians I consider successful to make much money.

KERBY: We work pretty hard to break even. People have this cute thing where, like, they heard of you on Pandora, so you must be huge. I had this one girl say, "You're on Pandora and you live here?!" It was so cute to me.

EMILY: I had someone come up to the merch table who was looking at the record and then looking at me and was like, "Is that you? I can't believe that's you!" I was like, "It's not that unbelievable. This is my show and we don't have a merch person."

KERBY: I think people have weird ideas about who can make music. Anyone can make music and lots of people do.

EMILY: But to get back to your question, whenever we do make money, we put it back into the band.

So from a tax specialist perspective, what's the best way for musicians to make money? Do you get annoyed when people listen to your music online and then don't buy an album?

EVERYONE: Oh no! No! No!

KERBY: I listen to music in so many different ways. Obviously the whole recording industry has had it wrong for so long, we're not trying to be on the wrong side of the winds of history. I think that the movement to monetizing music via live performance is really nice. I think that's a really lovely way to buy into a band. I like that the economics of the music industry are pushing musicians to work harder on their live shows. Buying a prerecorded thing is nice and I've definitely had spiritual experiences buying a record of a band that's changing my life, but it's so much more powerful to see them live.

EMILY: There's two ways we make money and they're both from shows: money from the door and money from merchandise. We get a little bit of money from royalties, but it's not that much. If we go on tour, we don't make much money, but we'll come home with some. And I think that's because we play places where there's a fan base; we're really connected with the people who host us and put on the shows. It's an organic gathering.

KERBY: It's kind of our version of a wedding. Other communities connect through weddings and we connect through tours. A Friend in the World is very much a thank-you note to our fans. The title is a reference to the experience we have traveling the world and having these month-long reunions, getting to meet people all over.

There's a campaign now to boycott bands that played at Michigan Women&#3 - Bitch Magazine

The band Lovers parlays their passion for vintage sequencers into a sound that pays tribute to the late 1980s and early 1990s, but resists nostalgia—or worse, faux-nostalgic hipster irony. Musicians Kerby Harris and Emily Kingan create compressed electronic soundscapes that form a backdrop to the subtle variations in lead singer and lyricist Carolyn Berk’s girlish alto. A little breathy, a little tremulous, it is the imperfections in Berk’s voice that give Lovers’ songs their urgency, creating a counterpoint to the drone of the synthesizers and Berk’s own understated vocal delivery.

The Portland, Oregon-based trio is slated to perform at Duke’s Bohemian Grove Bar on Saturday, October 19, headlining Ambush, Buffalo’s monthly party for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women. As the choice of venue implies, the members of the band are openly queer-identified, and the politics of desire make a prominent appearance in their music. Indeed, Lovers’ song “Figure 8,” from their 2010 album Darklight, is the best gay rights anthem in a decade, Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” notwithstanding. Avoiding the just-be-yourself clichés and awkward racial metaphors that plague Gaga’s famous single, Lovers present their homage to queer existence in calmly unapologetic terms, dismissing homophobic detractors with the declaration: “They don’t pray as hard as I ache.”

Lovers’ most recent album, A Friend in the World, released last month, foregoes declarative political anthems to explore more emotionally complex territory. Sporting song titles like “The Modern Art Museum of the Modern Kiss Goodbye” and “James Baldwin and the Diagonal Trance,” Berk’s lyrics resist easy interpretation. Ferris and Kingan match the obliqueness of the album’s lyrics with off-kilter rhythms that complement, but no longer march in lockstep with, Berk’s singing. In a recent interview with Artvoice, Emily Kingan explained that this new sound stems from Lovers’ desire for greater artistic autonomy: “When we were writing Darklight, we used a vintage sequencer to produce almost all of the melodic and much of the rhythmic components of the song. Using this sequencer was rather limiting as far as the complexity of the arrangements. For A Friend in the World, we wanted to move past that limitation and we progressed by starting to use software instead. We wanted to have more control over the songs this time.” The result is an album to which listeners can dance, or brood, with equal pleasure.

The band considers touring and performing to be political acts, regardless of the lyrical content of their songs. Kingan explains that the function of a Lovers show is to reinforce community-building in the cities they visit, and to temporarily embed themselves within local communities: “I think it feels political to exchange ideas with members of a community that is different than our own. It is important to see how different communities live and what they experience, the difficulties they face, the joys they feel…You take that information with you, it becomes part of you, and you may act differently or treat people differently because of it. It keeps your mind engaged and it reminds you that there are many ways to live. It reminds you to be compassionate and respectful, to be humble, to trust and not to judge.”

Kingan, the daughter of a longtime Buffalo area resident, spent “many a summer just outside of Buffalo visiting my grandparents.” She looks forward to revisiting Buffalo’s communities, observing that both the city and its artistic and queer subcultures seem to have found new life in recent years. Noting the enthusiasm with which the organizers of Ambush have welcomed Lovers, Kingan writes, “Buffalo always seemed like a bit of a mystery to me. As a child, we hardly ever went to Buffalo proper. It felt super desolate. Later, as an adult, it was hard for me to book shows there, and hard for me to find access to a community there. It is only in the last five years that I have been able to gain access to a community of people there, and actually get to know the city as an adult, as an artist, as a queer person. It has been really interesting and I am excited to explore it more!”

The emotionally raw, metaphor-laden synth pop of Lovers may seem like a strange musical departure for the band’s members: although Berk has performed under the name Lovers for over a decade, Harris’s musical background is in experimental metal, while readers may know Kingan as one half of feminist hardcore band The Haggard. Such a shift does have precedents: a number of queer and feminist artists—most notably, Kathleen Hanna, Gossip, and Tami Hart—have transitioned from guitar-driven rock to electro-pop. Kingan, however, demurs when asked how Lovers fits into this larger trend, declaring that she and others “are just making the music we want to make.” Kingan goes on to point out that electronic music has long influenced her, even though that influence may not always have been obvious: - Artvoice

Lovers' last disc, I Am the West, was one of the best albums to come out of Portland in 2009—even if its release went under the radar for a lot of people. It marked a change in Lovers frontwoman/founder Carolyn Berk's songwriting philosophy that took the band from being a singer-songwriter's outlet to a full-on synth-driven pop group (with Kerby Ferris and Emily Kingan joining up along the way), and it did so masterfully.

Lovers' next album shouldn't catch anyone by surprise, because we're not going to let it. We'll be premiering a few songs from the band's forthcoming disc, due out on October 12 on Portland's own Badman Records, here on LocalCut over the coming weeks and months.

[audio:Figure8.mp3]

The first of these premieres is "Figure 8," which has been appearing in the band's live sets for at least a year, and has always been a standout tune for its chant-along breakdown and sweet '80s keyboard riffs. The synth takes an even bigger role here than in concert, with that big bassy keyboard intro sounding like something from a particularly dramatic scene in The Breakfast Club. That retro feel fades into the background a bit when Berk comes in with the first verse of typically smooth double-tracked vocals. Berk cuts straight to the chase, singing about longing and separation and defiance all in the first couplet. The song reads both personally and politically: There's an unnamed "they" that sounds kinda like the religious right ("They don't pray as hard as I ache"; "They tried to take our power from us"), but it could just as well be overbearing parents or the police state. In either case, "Figure 8" makes for one hell of an anthem—be it for pissed-off teens (the "us against the world" sentiment really brings out my inner high-schooler) or for the gay rights movement. Either way, we're happy to sing along. - Willamette Week

Lovers' last disc, I Am the West, was one of the best albums to come out of Portland in 2009—even if its release went under the radar for a lot of people. It marked a change in Lovers frontwoman/founder Carolyn Berk's songwriting philosophy that took the band from being a singer-songwriter's outlet to a full-on synth-driven pop group (with Kerby Ferris and Emily Kingan joining up along the way), and it did so masterfully.

Lovers' next album shouldn't catch anyone by surprise, because we're not going to let it. We'll be premiering a few songs from the band's forthcoming disc, due out on October 12 on Portland's own Badman Records, here on LocalCut over the coming weeks and months.

[audio:Figure8.mp3]

The first of these premieres is "Figure 8," which has been appearing in the band's live sets for at least a year, and has always been a standout tune for its chant-along breakdown and sweet '80s keyboard riffs. The synth takes an even bigger role here than in concert, with that big bassy keyboard intro sounding like something from a particularly dramatic scene in The Breakfast Club. That retro feel fades into the background a bit when Berk comes in with the first verse of typically smooth double-tracked vocals. Berk cuts straight to the chase, singing about longing and separation and defiance all in the first couplet. The song reads both personally and politically: There's an unnamed "they" that sounds kinda like the religious right ("They don't pray as hard as I ache"; "They tried to take our power from us"), but it could just as well be overbearing parents or the police state. In either case, "Figure 8" makes for one hell of an anthem—be it for pissed-off teens (the "us against the world" sentiment really brings out my inner high-schooler) or for the gay rights movement. Either way, we're happy to sing along. - Willamette Week

"Lovers' last disc, I Am the West, was one of the best albums to come out of Portland in 2009-even if its release went under the radar for a lot of people... Lovers' next album shouldn't catch anyone by surprise, because we're not going to let it." Willamette Week

Loud and proud, Portland, OR based Lovers is a band of emotional intensity and complexity. Their new album Dark Light begins with singer Carolyn Berk's confession, "every time the music starts, I can feel my aching, shaking heart," and from there, Lovers embark on a spiritual journey of inspired three-part harmonies, deep introspection, and next-wave humor.

Dark Light, recorded at Portland's beloved Type Foundry studio with Badman label owner Dylan Magierek (Mark Kozelek, Thao Nguyen & Portland Cello Project, Starfucker)is the first for Berk, Ferris and Kingan together. Says Portland's Willamette Week, the new record marks "a change in Lovers philosophy that takes the band from being a singer-songwriter's outlet to a full-on synth-driven pop group, and it does so masterfully." The result is an expansive sonic landscape of colorful wonder and hope, and an interactive and engaging performance that strives to leave audiences inspired. These audiences will, in fact, have the opportunity to see Lovers live this fall, with full October and November tour dates to be announced soon.

Over the years, Carolyn Berk has established her unique voice as Lovers with four acclaimed, haunted and heart-broken previous albums. Lovers (celebrated lyricist Berk, synth-programmer and performance artist Kerby Ferris, and multimedia artist and percussionist Emily Kingan) craft an intimate portrait of female friendship, sexuality, and evolution as an infinite process. The three first encountered in 2002 after Berk's near-fatal van explosion while on tour with an earlier incarnation of the band. Emily Kingan, then on tour with classic Portland feminist hardcore band The Haggard, invited Berk to join the bill. Ferris was their roadie. Years later, Kingan organized a meeting for her two friends and future band-mates in South America, where Berk was travelling and Ferris was living at the time, performing in various experimental electronic projects in Sao Paulo's thriving music scene. The result was sisterly love at second site, and prophetic premonitions of the creative collaborations to come.

Says Berk about Lovers presently: "We are like sisters. We are sisters." - Willamette Week

With her head canted sideways, her eyes cast down, her arms engaged in some affair with the air—a Michael Stipe wave-chop, say, or a possessed preacher’s hortatory high-five to the sky—Lovers frontwoman Carolyn Berk sings as if struck anew by whatever bliss or brokenness first inspired her lyrics. It’s been a few years since Berk recruited programmer Kerby Ferris and percussionist Emily Kingan to assist in transforming Lovers’ guitar-based dolor into the vespertine electro-pop of 2010’s crushing Dark Light, and even though the band is, in Berk’s words, “a three-part collaboration,” she appears to be utterly alone up there, captivated by the sound surrounding her.

Berk’s movements are awesome theater, as they convey with corporeality the skein of feelings aroused by Lovers’ recent beat-heavy and synth-laden recordings, which by pop’s ineffable magic arrive at consoling vistas of cosmic balance by first burrowing deep down into the small and bittersweet things that happen in dark rooms and between sheets. What Berk might be doing up there in that shifting stage light, then, is getting to that place where the best love songs live, that zone between bodies and minds that explodes into something like grace.

“I like change,” Berk says, “progress of thought, progress of experience. So then you have to relearn the idea of the internal locus of control, otherwise you’ll just lose focus. I don’t want to live an unfocused life.” She is referring to her band’s future, but she might as well be describing Dark Light, or the 40 minutes Lovers spends attempting to turn those songs into breathing things in a room full of people: process, progress, learning, relearning, losing focus, finding focus, a whole mess of conflicting emotions going down at once, head canted sideways, eyes cast down. CHRIS STAMM. - Willamette Week

"IT'S ALL DEAD energies in this town/It's all pedantry and pedigree in this town/I needed an answer/I needed a song/I wanna be a dancer/when the music comes on."

Then the drums kick in, and a plinking jittery synth, as Carolyn Berk's fierce and urgent voice sings, "I am here and brave/You're gonna want me someday." The song is "To Be a Dancer (I Am Alive)," and it's an anthemic high point on the newest album from Portland band Lovers, the just-released Dark Light.

Dark Light is a high-reaching record, its best songs finding heartfelt middleground between the unadorned sincerity of Berk's voice and a synth-driven backdrop courtesy of collaborator Kerby Ferris. Rounding out the trio is Emily Kingan on drums, formerly of Portland queercore band the Haggard.

Long a project of Berk's—she's released five albums to date under the Lovers moniker—Dark Light is the second album in its current incarnation. At first listen, Dark Light is a thornier, darker piece of work than the trio's previous release, I Am the West—that album marked Berk's departure from singer/songwriter territory, harnessing her poetic lyrics to a handful of yearning, intelligent pop songs. The strength of I Am the West was apparent on first listen; Dark Light is slow burning but ultimately no less compelling.

The three members of Lovers currently live together; in our interview, they swap inside jokes and finish each other's sentences as they give me a CliffsNotes version of the evolution of the band.

"I love to write really quiet songs, introspective songs, but I found after years and years of exploring that, I don't like performing that. I decided that I wanted to bring a different energy to a room," Berk explains. "I wanted to bring more joy to wherever I was traveling."

She attributes some of her newfound equanimity to her move to Portland, and some to the simple fact of aging. "Turning 30 introduces an element of ease where there used to be none," Ferris agrees. "I cannot wait for our postmenopausal band.

"The direction we're all moving toward is one of greater awareness and reverence for intuition—learning to do things not out of fear, even if there's no proof that it's going to work out," Ferris continues, but Kingan interjects. "I don't know if I necessarily share those sentiments," she says. "For me it's more because I have a lot of respect and trust for my bandmates, and a lot of passion for the type of music that we make." It's metaphorically appropriate that it's the drummer who grounds the conversation, adding a pragmatic counterpoint to her bandmates' loftier ideas. (It probably also helps that Kingan is a tax accountant; a 2009 Accounting Today profile began, "Emily Kingan knows how to drum up business.")

While they might disagree on the particulars, the three women are clearly enthusiastic about the direction Lovers is moving in. And Berk is sharpening her songwriting skills: Lyrics like "I've been called the boy who cried wolf/thinking it was just my glass half full/I jumped in some nearly empty pools" beg to be written on a three-ring notebook in Sharpie. In the long run, whether Lovers splinters apart or goes on to form the world's best postmenopausal lesbian jam band—as long as their work remains grounded in Berk's songwriting, I'll keep listening. - The Portland Mercury

"IT'S ALL DEAD energies in this town/It's all pedantry and pedigree in this town/I needed an answer/I needed a song/I wanna be a dancer/when the music comes on."

Then the drums kick in, and a plinking jittery synth, as Carolyn Berk's fierce and urgent voice sings, "I am here and brave/You're gonna want me someday." The song is "To Be a Dancer (I Am Alive)," and it's an anthemic high point on the newest album from Portland band Lovers, the just-released Dark Light.

Dark Light is a high-reaching record, its best songs finding heartfelt middleground between the unadorned sincerity of Berk's voice and a synth-driven backdrop courtesy of collaborator Kerby Ferris. Rounding out the trio is Emily Kingan on drums, formerly of Portland queercore band the Haggard.

Long a project of Berk's—she's released five albums to date under the Lovers moniker—Dark Light is the second album in its current incarnation. At first listen, Dark Light is a thornier, darker piece of work than the trio's previous release, I Am the West—that album marked Berk's departure from singer/songwriter territory, harnessing her poetic lyrics to a handful of yearning, intelligent pop songs. The strength of I Am the West was apparent on first listen; Dark Light is slow burning but ultimately no less compelling.

The three members of Lovers currently live together; in our interview, they swap inside jokes and finish each other's sentences as they give me a CliffsNotes version of the evolution of the band.

"I love to write really quiet songs, introspective songs, but I found after years and years of exploring that, I don't like performing that. I decided that I wanted to bring a different energy to a room," Berk explains. "I wanted to bring more joy to wherever I was traveling."

She attributes some of her newfound equanimity to her move to Portland, and some to the simple fact of aging. "Turning 30 introduces an element of ease where there used to be none," Ferris agrees. "I cannot wait for our postmenopausal band.

"The direction we're all moving toward is one of greater awareness and reverence for intuition—learning to do things not out of fear, even if there's no proof that it's going to work out," Ferris continues, but Kingan interjects. "I don't know if I necessarily share those sentiments," she says. "For me it's more because I have a lot of respect and trust for my bandmates, and a lot of passion for the type of music that we make." It's metaphorically appropriate that it's the drummer who grounds the conversation, adding a pragmatic counterpoint to her bandmates' loftier ideas. (It probably also helps that Kingan is a tax accountant; a 2009 Accounting Today profile began, "Emily Kingan knows how to drum up business.")

While they might disagree on the particulars, the three women are clearly enthusiastic about the direction Lovers is moving in. And Berk is sharpening her songwriting skills: Lyrics like "I've been called the boy who cried wolf/thinking it was just my glass half full/I jumped in some nearly empty pools" beg to be written on a three-ring notebook in Sharpie. In the long run, whether Lovers splinters apart or goes on to form the world's best postmenopausal lesbian jam band—as long as their work remains grounded in Berk's songwriting, I'll keep listening. - The Portland Mercury

A Friend in the World comes out in September on Badman Recording Co., and it's a further installment in the Portland ensemble's library of ardent, powerful electroacoustic pop. The album was recorded here in Portland at Type Foundry Studios with Dylan Magierek and Adam Selzer, and its 10 songs will both be thrilling and familiar to Lovers fans, making the most of lyricist Carolyn Berk's full-hearted worldview and swooning, percussive backing from Kerby Ferris and Emily Kingan.

We're premiering a track from the album exclusively for you here; take a listen to "The Modern Art Museum of the Modern Kiss Goodbye" above. Its title alone perfectly encapsulates Lovers' ability to turn the frustration and exhilaration of relationships in the 21st century into smart, heady pop. Boasting a nighttime feel and a perpetual rhythm that's evocative of illuminated streetlights passing over a moving car in the heart of the city, it's perfect for both the dancefloor and for earbuds as its subtle melodic shades gradually assert themselves.

Of the new record, Berk says, "There's something very cosmically powerful about choosing love over and over and over again, recommitting to people and cooperating on creative endeavors. We wanted to make an album that reflected our commitments to supporting each other's creative processes. There is something so pure and magical about true friendship and love, and we wanted to pour that into this album." - The Portland Mercury

Portland, Ore,'s out queer band Lovers may not be as well known as say, Tegan and Sara or PJ Harvey, but that's just a matter of time. With their latest album A Friend in the World, the trio continues to remind us why we can't just turn our back on hipster rock-especially when the scene is producing something this good. The album was crafted as a celebration of love and friendship and the result is a dreamy, intimate synth-laden record full of feminist wit and atmospheric harmonies, with a queer underpinning. In other words, we love it. Standout tracks include the seductively moody "Oh Yeah" and the lesbian love song full of longing "Lavender Light". - Curve Magazine

Lovers' seventh studio album (and second long-player as a trio) mines familiar themes like love, empowerment, loss, and friendship, but bandleader Carolyn Berk's enigmatic lyrics and the group's penchant for crafting emotionally present melodies to support them, results in a winning collection of electrified and enlightened urban folk songs that effortlessly blend feminism with humor, adulation with heartache, and are more often than not simultaneously heartbreaking and inspiring. The trio feels more like a road-tested band this time around, with keyboard player/programmer Kerby Ferris and percussionist Emily Kingan sounding like a single, propulsive unit behind Berk's economical guitar playing and warm but spectral voice. That the trio knows to allow each other space says more about their musical relationship than the actual parts do, and songs like "Tiger Square," "Wander through the Time of Hearts," "James Baldwin & the Diagonal Trance," and the overcast and evocative "Modern Art Museum of the Modern Kiss Goodbye" skillfully trade familiar singer/songwriter architectural tropes for whirring, decidedly unfussy folktronica, bringing to mind artists like Grimes, Emilíana Torrini, and "Blood Makes Noise"-era Suzanne Vega. Berk hasn’t abandoned her troubadour past though, as evidenced by more traditionally arranged offerings like "Girl in the Grass" and "Lavender Light," but the ten-track A Friend in the World is at its best when it's hammering the decibel meter, which it does with great aplomb on the sultry, come-hither, electro-pop rave-up "Oh Yeah." - AllMusic