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Karen LovelyLow Register Warmth
Even before Koko Taylor’s passing, the number
of outstanding female blues singers was
alarmingly small. Things are looking up, though,
due to the emergence of Karen Lovely. She
placed second in the 2010 International Blues
Challenge in Memphis and saw her debut album,
Lucky Girl (Pretty Pear), jump to #1 on XM satellite
radio’s B.B. King’s Bluesville program. With
her energetic vocals and a studio band’s expert
musicianship matched to superior material and
production, Lovely’s newest album, Still The
Rain (Pretty Pear), stands out just as much.
Lovely also subverts the stereotype typically
pinned on blues mamas. “I love belting it out,”
she said while at home in southern Oregon. “But
I’m finding I have much more to offer as a vocalist
by exploring more subtle nuances and using
my lower register—and, really, how many times
can you hit people over the head with powerhousing?
I have Dennis Walker and Alan Mirikitani to
thank for seeing that potential in me and helping
me to develop it.”
Walker, a three-time Grammy winner for his
service to Robert Cray and B.B. King, produced
the album and co-wrote almost all of the songs
with Mirikitani.
“Karen is a huge talent,” he said. “She came
so prepared to the studio and sang every tracking
vocal like it was for absolute real—and it was. Al
and I wrote 35 or 40 songs before we got the ones
she liked, and they fit her like a glove.”
Lovely returned the praise: “Dennis is a master
at establishing mood both musically and lyrically.
You can hear the floorboards creak and the
radiators hiss in his lyrics.”
For his producing, Lovely called Walker “a
reductionist, a distiller, a minimalist” and added
that “he leaves space in order to draw the listener
in [so] what’s not there is as important as what is.”
Walker emphasized that “it’s all about the vocal”
and going with first or second takes that “catch the
fire, the newness, the enthusiasm in the players.”
A native of coastal Massachusetts, Lovely
first sang the blues—along with jazz, folk and
pop—professionally in 1987, when she resided in
London. After moving to the Pacific Northwest,
she worked outside music for many years. Why’d
she start singing again? “It was a combination of
things: a devastating major life change and a realization
that it was now or never. Every day that
went by without me doing the thing I loved was
another day lost. So I joined a choir and started
doing a once-a-month singer showcase. Then I
started sitting in with a blues band every Monday
night and developed a following. The club owner
offered me my own night, and that was it.”
—Frank-John Hadley
james naGle
NOVEMBER 2010 DOWNBEAT 25