NYS Music 202​2

Category: Women in NY’s Music Industry

  • Karina Rykman talks Seth Myers, Marco Benevento, Upstate NY and December Tour

    Karina Rykman is a name that is often brought up in conversations discussing everything from “who is next ” to “who is doing it best” with good reason. Growing up in New York City and never adhering to a single band or bending the knee to one musical subculture, Karina breaks down genre barriers naturally. Charismatic and upbeat, Karina’s live music experience provides a sense of togetherness during a time of intense isolation and separation. Karina Rykman’s music defies perceptions by providing a big sound with few bodies on the stage.

    Photo: Jesse Faatz

    Karina is currently hitting the road with her power trio featuring Adam November (Guitar/Looper/Effects) and Chris Corsico (Drums). Destinations will be throughout the Northeast and begin in Upstate New York. She’ll be performing at The Upstairs in Ithaca on November 30th and at Albany’s Lark Hall on December 1st. Karina’s live show provides nourishment for the brain with technical hypnotism while simultaneously allowing stress relief with an attitude heavily weighing on the side of fun.

    Photo By Em Walis

    Opening the night in Albany for Karina Rykman is Burlington, VT-based Quiltro, who bring a psychedelic sound reminiscent of Circles Around the Sun. Their 2020 debut record has been described as the soundtrack for a dystopian sci-fi film that has yet to be released. Featuring Mark Taylor (guitar/keys), JD Hoffmann (drums) and Mike McKinley (bass), their Lark Hall performance marks the first hometown show for the Albany-native McKinley. Get a taste of what’s in store with their performance of “Antilla,” filmed at Autochrome, a community studio space in the south end of Burlington. 

    Karina took time to chat with Em Walis about her upcoming tour, creative process, oysters and the metaverse. This conversation took place the week after filling in on Seth Meyers for the second time and before playing a few shows with Marco Benevento. Karina gave insight on how growing up in New York with parents in academia led to a mindset framework for discovery and integration.

    Em Walis: Where are you right now?

    Karina Rykman: I’m home actually. Unbelievably, I’m home. I will play with Marco tomorrow. It’s nice – a little hometown vibe then off to Connecticut followed by Massachusetts and then home on Sunday. Then Thanksgiving week, and then on to the next. We’re going to enjoy this time. It’s pretty crazy. Last week specifically I thought “oh my god, I have a weekend at home to dial everything in”. I’m really trying to prepare in a big way. 

    EW: And some recovering I’m sure.

    KR: Oh, definitely and in a super big way because my October was so slammed and just, just crazy. I spent two weeks on the road with Marco on the West Coast. And the first weekend of the month my band did a festival in Virginia, and a festival in Pennsylvania. It felt as though I was just on the road the entire time; flying, driving, planes, trains, automobiles. November was going to be chill, rehearsing with my band, and just one weekend with Marco, and then I get a call from my buddy Eric, who’s the producer on Late Night with Seth Meyers asking “Hey, are you around this week?” “Oh snap. Yes, I AM around!”

    EW: Stars aligning is awesome.

    Photo: Jesse Faatz

    KR: Crazy, crazy. And then I did last week and it was amazing. It was on guitar. The last time I publicly played guitar was last December at the Capitol Theater. I played two tunes on guitar for this Headcount benefit. It was with Larry Campbell and so many incredible players. In the past I played guitar on the Today Show, backing up Julia Michaels in 2017. So anyway, all I’m trying to say is there have been very few and far between guitar gigs. I got that call late Monday night, and they asked for me to come in on Wednesday and Thursday. That Tuesday was Election Day, so I was voting and then practicing, just trying to become a confident guitar player again. I just want to do such a good job and I don’t want to let anyone down, almost to a fault. I over prepare and over prepare.

    Photo By Em Walis

    EW: This can be good. Even if it’s just a visualization or something. I would be curious how you manage all of the hats that you wear? In switching head spaces from Marco mode to solo mode to, you know, selling guitars on the side. Haha

    KR: Great question. It definitely requires patience with yourself, as well as actively recognizing that you’re switching gears and shifting hats. When I work with Marco it’s really fun for me because I am a hired gun who’s not in charge of anything. 

    EW: And he’s really fun. 

    KR: Oh, he’s the most incredibly fun loving, hysterical, wonderful band leader and mad scientist. He’s just incredible. So all of that combined, results in not a lot of stress for me in the same way that my solo band is. The solo stuff is more pressure on me because it’s my band, it’s my name, I book the hotel rooms and rent the van and figure out all the logistics, and everything. It’s my music. So you’re kind of putting yourself out there in a big way

    Photo by Em Walis

    EW: On all sides of music, from every angle, it seems we all have this similar internal story going on or a question of how safe is this space for me? Just emotionally and with that, you know, there are different levels.  Sometimes it’s totally chill and at other times, as you said, which I think is great. Just a little more active noticing where am I?  What’s the actual thing that’s at stake here? Why is everybody here? Sometimes you’re in situations where you feel a little more pressure or more scrutinized. Depending on the venue or if it’s a festival with strangers.

    KR: Especially this TV gig, you know? Those nerves never quite go away. Working on a new thing, or taking a new gig, or launching into some sort of uncharted territory, I’m often thinking “I’m so nervous, why do I keep putting myself in these situations?” But honestly, those are the moments where you know you’re doing something cool as shit, because you feel that way. There’s something worth suffering over. And then you overcome it. You’re like, wow, learn from that. 

    Photo: Michael DiDonna

    EW: Absolutely. I’ve been curious about what brain scans of musicians might look as compared to extreme sports dudes. We are acclimated to these huge buckets of epinephrine and dopamine being poured all over us. It seems as though in those down moments, when we can remember that one time that you were home. We look at our laundry. It’s not all the excitement, tea cups are worth of satisfaction from that. I don’t know if that’s worth it.

    KR: It’s so funny. I find that especially in the last few years, having adjusted to no gigs for a minute there. Now, with them coming back, you’re in a constant state of readjustment – you’re either adjusting to tour life or adjusting to home life. And honestly, if you do it as much as I do it, you don’t have the time to be fully adjusted to either, but as soon as you do, you have to go home and then you are a total circus freak at home for a minute with this misplaced adrenaline that hits you at midnight when you’re supposed to go to sleep and you’re thinking, ‘Wait, where’s my show? Where’s the show? Where are the people? Where are my friends?’ 

    Photo By Em Walis

    EW: I was curious about your creative process and how you manage or if you have any recommendations for those that are newer in this back and forth.  Do you have anything that helps you get into it?

    KR: That’s a great question. I’m very lucky to have such a great producer and writing partner whose name is Gabe Monro, whom I’ve written almost all my tunes with. I can’t speak too much on this, but I have a whole record that’s going to see the light of day next year. I’m so much more of a social creator, if that makes sense. I don’t go into my bedroom and come out 12 hours later with the greatest song – I find that when I work with Gabe or I work with my band, we make the creative process sort of a communal thing and that elicits better results. For lyrics though, I do need to be alone. Gabe and I have this process where we basically write what we refer to as ‘seedlings’, which can be just an A section and a B section or whatever it might be, but it’s just a vibe. I bring that home with me and if I always know that, if we work in the studio all day and then I come home with a seedling that I’m so geeked on, it’s two in the morning and I HAVE to listen to it, you know that it’s worth developing and worth sticking to. But sometimes you have seedlings and then you listen back the next day, and you’re not inspired at all. So it goes.

    EW: We’re not seeing roots. We’re not seeing a little leaf pop out on that paper towel.

    KR: Totally. It’s amazing to have folders and folders of seedlings that maybe in a year or two I can go back through them and be like, ‘Oh my god, there was something here! This is an inspiring moment.” 

    Photo: Steph Port

    EW: What’s your view on the balance between a purist straight plugged in sound versus effects driven sound?

    KR: I am a big fan of both things in moderation. With my band specifically, I really love the fact that with Adam November on guitar, he’s so much more than just a classically ripping guitar player. He is a complete mad scientist over there with multiple loopers and effects and crazy stuff going on. I don’t even know what to call it or what it is, but I think that’s very specific to us. That is a big part of the sound.It’s obviously a trio, but we are larger than the sum of our parts. I don’t want you to come to my show and think that you’re seeing a measly three piece – you’re seeing a power trio. You’re coming to see a full, lush sonic experience.

    EW: I was wondering if you ever, in perhaps middle school years, had any particular musical identity commitments? 

    KR: You know, from the jump I had very diverse tastes, I had my metal friends, my jam friends, and beyond. I was a sponge. I never pledged allegiance to one style or genre. I would see Slayer on Saturday and Phish on Sunday.

    EW: I think sometimes it gets forgotten is that you can you can belong in multiple spaces and be welcomed into multiple spaces and your status or validity does not come from your commitment to one particular scene or your amount of shows on your spreadsheet or you know, which you know which special event with that special seat and you happen to be present for that. There’s so much more. 

    KR: I never pledged allegiance to one style or genre. I would be at Slayer on Saturday and Phish on Sunday.

    Photo By Em Walis

    EW: What was music the relationship with music in your house growing up? 

    KR: Well, my parents are both academics.They both teach at Columbia University. They are so supportive. They’re so thrilled, and can recite to you every lyric of every song I’ve ever written. They’re at every show that they possibly can be at, but there was very little music exposure in my house growing up. My dad would listen to Goldberg Variations (Bach) on CD while he was writing, but they didn’t show me the Beatles, The Stones or Led Zeppelin, or any normal stuff, and I’m super grateful honestly. I was able to form these absolutely insane bonds with the music I enjoy, and it was such a desire of my own and not a desire of somebody else’s. Those were all my own discoveries. I really appreciate them for that.

    EW: Beautiful. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems your parents provided a framework to pursue a curiosity and manifest a passion. Maybe there wasn’t literally music in the house, but there were many curiosities being pursued.

    Photo by Em Walis

    KR: In a big way. My dad writes books and gives lectures, he’s a philosopher, and for me growing up, I saw this guy wake up every day, sit on his yellow chair and write and write. And then he goes for a walk, and then he comes back from a walk and, you know, in his super jovial, hilarious manner, has all these thoughts that came to him on his walk, and he runs back to his yellow chair and writes them all down before he forgets them. And seeing his complete dedication and commitment and joy for what it is that he’s interested in, gave me the utmost permission to do the same, and it allowed me to explore the stuff that did it for me in that exact same way. 

    EW: Thank you again for taking the time. My last question is from Dogs In A Pile. They would like to know what your favorite gas station snack is while on tour?

    KR: Chex Mix Bold Party Blend. Thank you!

    Karina Rykman Late Fall 2022 Tour Dates

    NOV 30 The Upstairs Ithaca, NY TICKETS

    DEC 1 Lark Hall Albany, NY TICKETS

    DEC 2 Soundcheck Studios Pembroke, MA TICKETS

    DEC 3 Nectars Burlington, VT TICKETS

    DEC 7 The Press Room Portsmouth, NH TICKETS

    DEC 8 Sun Tiki Studios Portland, ME TICKETS

    DEC 9 Park City Music Hall Bridgeport, CT TICKETS

    DEC 10 Pearl Street Warehouse Washington, DC TICKETS

  • NYC Artist Alexa Dark Releases Old Hollywood Inspired Single “Cool For You”

    NYC-based artist Alexa Dark released her new Old Hollywood-inspired indie rock single “Cool For You” from her upcoming debut EP.

    Alexa Dark
    Photo by West Webb.

    Alexa Dark is a Spanish/American multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter raised between Barcelona, Munich, London, and NYC. Her music takes inspiration from her multi-background upbringing. She started writing music and poetry at a young age. Dark began performing live in London, then moved to NYC and released her first song “Fade to Black and Blue” in 2021.

    Her upcoming EP will focus on her villain origin story through the lens of a ’60s, Bondlike, French new wave film, where the singer goes from heartbroken starlet to a dark feminine, mysterious siren. Through this new era, Dark comments on the nature of feminity and the shadows of oneself, where the enemy is someone’s life is actually them.

    “Cool For You” is a dark indie rock anthem, with Dark’s haunting vocals shining through. The song is produced by Matt Chiaravalle, who has worked with the likes of Warren Zevon and Debbie Harry. The lyrics are vampy and set the tone of the Old Hollywood scene. The lyrics “You’re nostalgia/In a black velvet suit/I pick my persona/Like you pick your shoes,” help create a scene in your mind as you listen. Dark tries to be an interesting person to the other person she is describing as she sings “I try to be cool for you/I try not to break in two/But I do.”

    Alexa Dark is making a name for herself coming up on her new EP, as she is creating a cult following on apps like TikTok and Instagram, and she doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon.

  • Rising Like a Phoenix, Kelli Baker Never Fails to Impress

    The Long Island music scene has a star with a trajectory rising like a Phoenix out of the music halls around town. Meet Kelli Baker, a transplant from Arizona, who has momentum unlike anyone.  This soulful singer is a cross between Amy Winehouse and Susan Tedeschi. Her original music erupts in an emotional whirlwind as she draws you in. 

    I had the chance to interview Kelli Baker on The Long Island Sound podcast back in June and her rise to prominence has been something to behold. After the passing of her dad several years ago, Kelli packed her bags and headed for Huntington Village, on the Northshore of Long Island.  Her energetic live performance is insync with her go-for-it attitude and work ethic.  Continuing with skills in hospitality, Kelli worked several jobs while gigging around the village with her bag of cover songs and an occasional original song snuck into the mix. 

    With a chuckle in her voice, this starling belts out emotional verses with the ease of a carnival barker. She connects with her audience as she calls us into the curiosity of her sideshow.  The circus of sideshow gigs as a result has landed Kelli on the main stage. She was recently signed to the parade of Sony Music artists this past January under the Bad Jeu Jeu CDX Record label.  

    The hard work and song writing has seemed to have payed off, as she landed Monster Cables as a sponsor and just a few days ago She also landed a spot on Spotify’s Editorial Playlist, Blues Roots among some of the top names in the business, Jon Baptist, Tedeschi Trucks, and The Black Keys.

    Blood on the Nile 

    Her recent single release, Blood on the Nile hit the airwaves on September 9th. Recorded in Cove City Sound Studios in Glen Cove, It features another guest on the podcast, Brother Dave (Solomon) . Dave is an excellent slide and lap steel guitar player also featured as a guest on the podcast. 

    Kelli Baker acoustic guitar
    Kelli Baker
    Kelli Baker – Blood On the Nile

    The song, Blood on the Nile invites you in with the call of a pedal steel guitar, and slowly builds to a crescendo of emotion as Kelli exudes a passion that only a heart with scars can comprehend. Her catalog of songs are deep and insightful. The track, Cathedral released early in 2020 sets a scene as the bells toll for thee and me. The exploration of Kelli’s music has just begun for me. She tailored her sound both as a solo performer in the music halls, wineries, bars and pubs, from North Shore to the South Shore and to points East on the Island. 

    Gathering excellent band members around her, Ms. Baker embarked on a Summer tour along the East Coast to excellent reviews.  This past month the Kelli Baker duo opened for the all female Swedish band, Thundermother at the Paramount in Huntington.  

    This exploration into Kelli Baker’s music has just begun. I could wax poetic with flowery prose, but after seeing her performance at the Blue Point Brewery, this past August, I left the venue having gone through a memorable experience, weary with emotion and thirsting for more.

  • A Rocker Mom’s Roller Coaster Ride Comes to Life in Amy Rigby’s “Girl To City”

    If you want a blast of the dirty ol’ D.I.Y. NYC rock scene of mid-70’s – late-90’s, look no further than Girl To City, the memoir of the critically-acclaimed but never quite platinum-selling singer-songwriter Amy Rigby.

    Now quietly residing in Catskill with her musician hubby, the legendary Brit punk Wreck-less Eric of Stiff’s Records fame, Rigby’s story is a unique one of music and young motherhood played out against creative cauldron of the then low-rent, dangerously delicious Lower East Side. Girl to City is the story of her progression from “Elton Girl,” a pop loving rebellious Catholic schooler in suburban Pittsburgh, to Manhattan art student, fledgling alt. country musician/temp office worker to “indie darling,” one who causes a big but, too brief national sensation with her 1996 solo debut, Diary of A Mod Housewife. 

    As someone tattooed by a Catholic school education myself, I can relate to a good deal of what Rigby has to tell about her early years.  

    At seven, Amy decides to cast her lot with the music-loving sinners rather than the saints – coming to the realization that she’d rather marry Monkee Mike Nesmith than her powerful first crush, Jesus Christ.  Rigby is really lightning struck with the magic of words + music when she hears Dylan for the first time at a Girls Scouts’ picnic in the park, from the transistor radio of a bunch of pot-smoking hippies loafing on an adjacent blanket.  

    Rigby leaves high school a year early to move to NYC and study the “dying art” of fashion illustration at Parsons. The year is 1976 – the age of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, CBGBs and The Ramones, the year after that President Ford tells the nearly bankrupt metropolis to “Drop Dead!” on the front page of the New York Daily News. She will move among several apartments on sketchy blocks in the neighborhood until she finally departs for Brooklyn, 15 years later. She is delighted when she spies creative icons like jazz legend Charles Mingus, Television’s Tom Verlaine, John Cage, Brian Eno and Yoko Ono almost daily on the streets. 

    Rigby enters the thick of the music scene when she takes a job as “a No Wave coat check girl” at the club, Tier 3. It is through this hotspot and others downtown, and a boyfriend named Bob, that she will finally act on her musician/performer aspirations. Her sound is not NYC punk but one shaped by her newfound love of classic country – Merle Haggard, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn and the like. From this emerges her first band, The Last Roundup, a cute countrified quartet with her younger brother Michael in tow. This band will have a four-year run, one marked by an exhausting string of gigs in venues small and a few large ones, opening for major acts like The Raincoats. There’s a disastrous trip to Nashville to record an album that won’t see the light of day and a trip to the Midwest to wax one that finally does, Twister, their 1987 debut on Rounder Records.

    Girl to City

    In addition to music, Rigby has a lot of boys on her mind and in her life.  There’s the aforementioned musician Bob and a married Brit called only “The Manager,” someone comes into her life for a whirlwind affair in New York and when she briefly continues her art studies in London. There’s the culture-centric “D,” who introduces her to foreign film and experimental theater, but whose love of heroin she smartly skirts. He is someone who will inspire one of her most memorable songs, “Dark Angel.” Then there’s the ultimately jail-bound street hustler Joe. He’s the kind of guy who drops by a quickie and then asks her to hold onto his pistol (literal, not figurative). Amy will finally settle down and marry Will Rigby, the drummer for the dBs, with whom she will have a daughter, Hazel. He will broaden her musical palate by introducing her to items like the Beach Boys’ Smile bootleg, something she compares to taking LSD or tasting pastrami for the first time.

    From The Last Roundup, Rigby will move onto The Shams. This is a group formed with two other girl singers, an outgrowth of their attempts to raise cash by singing Christmas carols on the street and Raffi tunes at children’s birthday parties. It is in this band that Amy’s talent for writing comes to the fore, in tunes like “Down at the Texaco” and “File Clerk Blues,” a number based on her life as an office temp. The group will go on to record a single, an EP and one full-length album for the then-fledgling Matador label, Quilt, produced by Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye. As with her entire career, Amy would experience highs and lows with The Shams. There were huge gigs opening shows on nationwide tours for The Indigo Girls and Urge Overkill to nearly empty clubs. There’s even one gig where they “were paid in pierogis.” Regrettably, she can’t tell the other girls she wants to go solo and ultimately breaks up with them via fax. 

    Through her time with these bands, Amy would be struggling with motherhood, finding someone to care for her young daughter when she or her drummer husband were away on tour, at rehearsals or recording.  The always on tour lifestyle would ultimately lead to the breakup of her marriage to Will.

    Bravely, Rigby also addresses the financial realities of the music business at this level. She spends a good deal of time reminiscing, often positively and humorously, about the string of day jobs she takes to make ends barely meet – from serving ice cream to celebs like actress Sandy Dennis to temping in real estate offices and the legal department at CBS Records. She provides a refreshing view on what many musicians would consider an obstacle – saying that these days jobs are a part of a musician’s life, not something that stands in the way of it. She reminds us that they were also a way to get free photocopies for the street posters and mailers that were an important promo device for musicians in the pre-social media era. And it is through the CBS job that she will meet the man who champions her and lands her a deal to make her solo debut for Koch Records, 1996’s Diary of A Mod Housewife, produced by The Cars’ Elliot Easton. 

    “There was one month in my adult life, August 1996, when everything went right,” writes Rigby.  That was the month her debut album came out to glowing reviews in Rolling Stone, People, Billboard, Entertainment Week and many more.  Amy even scored an interview, one she thinks in retrospect might’ve been too revealing, with NPR’s Terry Gross on “Fresh Air.”  Interestingly, she recently did a second interview with Gross to promote this book.

    But for all the promise, Rigby is back working at CBS in a little over a year. Her critically-applauded debut only sells around 20,000 copies, at a time when contemporaries like Liz Phair and Sheryl Crowe will hundreds of thousands and millions respectively.

    Regrettably, this is kind of where Girl to City wraps up this installment of her life story, with a slight jump ahead in the prologue and epilogue to her daughter Hazel striking out as a musician on her own. But there is so much more to tell.

    With a hell of a lot of heart and dignity, Rigby has continued to do what she did then – write and record quirky, interesting story songs, ones loved by a modest cult of literate music-lovers. She continues to make albums and periodically tour, playing to adoring audiences in modest venues here and abroad, usually solo but sometimes with her husband Wreckless Eric Goulden. At the conclusion of Girl to City, she spent a few years working as a songwriter in Nashville and several years in France with Eric.  She also continues to periodically work those day jobs to make the ends of an itinerant artist’s life meet, notably in an Upstate N.Y. bookstore whose staff helped light a fire under her to write this story.

    From the verbal flow to the emotion and insight imparted, Rigby has discovered another great talent – that of putting words on paper, sans the music.  She has always been a great story-tellers who, until now, has limited her writer’s gifts to the three-minute song.  

    For those who lived through this era of NYC, Girl to City is a real trip down memory lane.  It comes complete with all the touchstones – the post-gig chow downs at Wo Hops or Kiev, seeing Basquiat or Keith Haring scribble their art on tenement and subway walls, the sights and smells of the bathrooms at CBGB and much more.  It all comes into sharp focus in Amy’s writing.

    Memoirs of life in the East Village of this era are now a growing cottage industry. There are many entries but very few that are as good as Amy’s and John Lurie’s recent autobiography.  

    Like much of what she had done, Girl To City is a gutsy D.I.Y. project, self-published by Amy’s own Southern Domestic imprint, which can be found at her website, www.amyrigby.com  You can head here to sample her music, on-going blog and a podcast version of this fine book.