Kate Vargas Announces new LP + Shares "Roll Around"

Photo by Jared Roybal.

Listen to "Roll Around"

May 15, 2018 (Press Release) -- New York-based Americana/folk singer-songwriter Kate Vargas has announced the release of her forthcoming LP For The Wolfish & Wandering and has shared the lead single at No Depression, who praised the Corrales, N.M. native's latest work in saying "Vargas' sensitivity to the rhythms around her gives her music a pulsing, hypnotic energy. The music sounds familiar, but it will take you down unfamiliar roads."
 
For The Wolfish & Wandering is out July 27th.
 
A reformed wild child, in recent years Kate Vargas has traded the party for meditation, yoga, clean eating and a renewed focus on what she values most—her music. The New Mexico-raised, NYC-based artist is building ever more mindfully on her sound, and the music press is taking notice, Vargas receiving praise from a variety of respected outlets including Impose, The Boot and the Huffington Post, the latter assessing, “There is an unlimited amount of potential in this superstar on the rise.”
Vargas has packed houses from Ireland’s Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival to The Troubadour in London, The Mansion on O Street in Washington D.C. to New York’s Bowery Electric. Her upcoming album, For The Wolfish & Wandering (out July 27), features her singular folk-style storytelling. The songs are grounded in a darkly melodic, reverb-washed sonic palette of dreampop, dusty folk and junkyard blues, all carried by Vargas’ rough-hewn vocals and guitar playing. In equal measure, she channels a surprising array of artists, from Tom Waits and 16 Horsepower to Lana Del Rey and K. Flay.

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On the new record, Vargas’ moody and deeply personal songs weave stories from her life with tales she soaked up from literature and also the rich oral folklore tradition with which she grew up. “You can’t get lower than the ground, but you can roll around for a long time,” Vargas sings on the album’s lead track “Roll Around,” a smoky, desolate number that hits hard, priming listeners for a wild jaunt into the emotional depths. The song, Vargas says, is about “being comfortable with discomfort.” While an air of unease permeates the new record’s narratives, Vargas explains, “Even though I get pretty dark, I always intend it with a smirk. I like being able to step back, detach and look at things as a fly on the wall.”
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Always challenging, For The Wolfish & Wandering is peppered with restless moments, from the aforementioned “Roll Around” to “Mountain Song” (which pulls from the New Mexican story of the “Taos Hum,” pondering the value of knowledge gained) and stripped-down acoustic ballad “Madeline” (a 19th-century yarn about a troubled patient at New York’s Willard Asylum). Whether drawn from folklore or direct experience, Vargas injects an intimate feel into each song via her poetic lyricism and jagged vocal delivery. On “7 Inches,” based on a chord progression Vargas had been toying with since she was just 16, her vocals are at once sultry and ominous, imbuing the song with a subtle tension. “This Affliction”—written in the wake of the tragic shooting at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub—juxtaposes a creeping rhythm, a bleak melody, clinking percussion, mournful dobro guitar and ghostly whistling with striking lyrics that question the role social media plays in revealing ourselves to others. “Pick apart my lonely heart,” Vargas sings, “it’s a morbid motif but I look pretty from a distance and the rest is history.” Drawing from a deep well of tragedy, Vargas damn near hypnotizes, her compositions seeping to the edge of the subconscious, hardwiring listeners to ponder questions that, in other contexts, might make them squirm.

While Vargas’ sharp tractor-beam-like storytelling is a big part of For The Wolfish & Wandering’s draw, the music is every bit as strong. Before a recent European tour, Vargas found and fell in love with a vintage 1949 Marveltone guitar. “It has such a personality and sound,” she says. “I played it all over Europe and was so attached to it that I knew I wanted to make it the centerpiece of this album.” In late 2017, Vargas joined forces with producer Charles Newman, the primary engineer and co-producer for Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields. Newman helped Vargas achieve the unvarnished sound she was looking for, peppering the album’s sonic landscape with simple, inventive percussion using everyday objects, from milk jugs and trash cans to rusted chains—even the body of her beloved Marveltone. The result is Vargas’ most adventurous album to date.

Vargas’ childhood in Corrales, New Mexico, had a profound impact on the woman and artist she would become. This artist and farming village just outside Albuquerque was populated with Mexican-Catholic families like hers, as well as creatives and a variety of seekers. It was a community rich in oral tradition and folklore, steeped in tales of good and evil, ghosts and witches, sin, The Devil—even extraterrestrial visitors.  “It was a strange and wonderful place that I’ve really come to appreciate as an adult. There was a culture of storytelling, and the stories were often dark—the way I write songs now is rooted in that tradition. The paranormal and the supernatural always seem to make their way in. It was a great place for an imagination to run wild. If I told my mother I was bored, she’d tell me, ‘Go outside and pretend something.’”

Still, the slow pace of rural small-town life was excruciating at times for Vargas, who longed for the action and possibility of the big city. She began playing the flute at a young age and by the time she was in high school developed an interest in jazz that led her to Boston where she studied music at Berklee. Once there, she consistently found herself coming back to writing and guitar after classes. Upon graduating from Berklee, Vargas relocated to New York City, playing an open mic night every Monday at the now defunct P & G Bar on the Upper West Side. “People responded really positively to the songs,” she says, “ and that kept me coming back.”