Katy Pinke is a Manhattan-based singer-songwriter, painter and actor and her self-titled debut album is out now on the new Glamour Gowns label. The songs on her album possess a direct and inviting quality, but within each, a quiet battle is being waged in an ongoing struggle to, as Pinke puts it, “unconditionally love a fragmented self.” The album strips Pinke’s art down to its absolute essence. At the home studio of Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Cass McCombs), she recorded her vocals and minimal guitar accompaniments live with drummer Jeremy Gustin in front of an audience of a few friends. The idea was to capture the energy of Pinke’s live shows—storied events in the NYC indie rock scene. Katy’s music is best described as experimental folk, inspired by the odd song structures and conversationality of artists like Bill Callahan and Aldous Harding with a lithe vocal delivery reminiscent of The Roches and Connie Converse. She’s a really respected figure in the NYC scene and she also regularly plays in Delicate Steve’s band. The record’s most devastating moments are sometimes also its most fun (“Tomato,” “One Coin”). Elsewhere, there are bittersweet moments of effortless beauty (“Grapefruit,” “Strawman”). In Pinke’s music, life sometimes feels like a series of pushes into a vast, hopeful unknown, and the time spent conserving our energy in between them. All we can do, she hypothesizes, is try to stay in tune with ourselves while waiting for the next opportunity to try again.

What She Says: “This song is like a lullaby to myself. It was to deal with the pain of love and loss that happened when I was very young, that I never dealt with but was finally ready to. It is about remembering a love after loss, maybe a love you never let yourself feel and you finally do…I wanted to write something that could have been the kind of melody I might have heard in the twinkling notes floating out of my childhood jewelry box, or a classic forgotten show-tune — the sort of music I grew up singing, the sort of music my grandparents loved. There is a part of me suspended in time, protected in love, even when the rest of me didn’t think it was.“

“Tomato is tonally the lightest song on the record, but also a devastating run-on sentence about the most destructive gambits of a dysfunctional relationship. The narrator remembers “hoping that we’ll start a fight to/Work through/The demons inside our own heads/That we put onto each other’s faces”. I think this song is about the struggle for humans to co-exist or see each other’s pain and the inner delusions that get in the way.”

“One Coin takes an irreverent tone while underlining the ultimate nightmare scenario for any self-inquisitive person: that, no matter how hard you try, you may always be unable to actually get a complete sense of yourself: “Isn’t that just what they say/that you are the only one/who doesn’t see your own lies/and doesn’t see your own light/and doesn’t see how they relate/One coin, just two sides”.

“Bloom is a musical monologue about trusting one’s emotional intuition. The song begins haltingly, each phrase like a wave slowly lapping up onto shore and retracting, before working itself up into a frenzy“. Pinke uses the title as a description and a command—addressed to a loved one but just as much to herself—sung at the top of her range as the song accelerates and pushes into a sprawling, hopeful unknown: “See the light/How it flows/From the center/To the rose…Dare/To bloom.”

Her mixtape:

Roberta Flack – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Roberta Flack was my childhood role model. I first heard her when I was seven years old. Her voice and her heart mirrored each other’s clarity and she took care of me (through a cassette tape my mom would play for me, to help me fall asleep). I had trouble sleeping as a little kid, I was anxious and had trouble trusting the night. Roberta made me feel safe to live. Her way of channeling her heart into such meaningful lyrics is imprinted on me forever. This whole album (“First Take”) is so important to me. 

Bill Callahan – What Comes After Certainty

Bill Callahan returns me to a future version of myself who is already older, wiser, and quietly surrendered to life. When I first heard him I guessed he was a gemini too and I was right. My association with my own gemini-ness is about inner conflict and endless struggle between different parts of myself – but I always have this sense that that’s just the gemini karma, and if you let it, it can lead to a friction-born wisdom. I hear that in Bill’s life through his words, his voice, his song-making. His songs, to me, on every level, experientially transmit and ARE the thing or process they are verbally describing. They’re vehicles. This song, especially the opening, hits me so deeply for that reason.

Half Japanese – No Direct Line From My Brain To My Heart

Half Japanese FREES me. Jad Fair is a completely unleashed spirit. What he does is so purely about the thing that it goes beyond the thing. His work reminds me that art is about communicating something THROUGH the form. I mean, I LOVE the form he takes, the wildness of what he does, but it’s because of this drive, this intention, bursting through it. I heard this song for the first time when I was in a Mo Tucker (also such a pure player) rabbit hole and somehow ended up here by association. I could not stop smiling.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny – Letter from Home

Blue Gene Tyranny. This recording blows me away. This whole album is a complete inscrutable mystery to me and also feels like a gift from the heaven of mind theater. It has so much depth, so much love for life, for chance, for the unknown.  It is filled with wonder. It’s a letter.

Miles Davis Quintet – It Never Entered My Mind

Miles Davis Quintet. This is my number one favorite recording. It is merged so intimately at this point with my psyche that when I close my eyes and call it to mind, I can almost hear it exactly. The first time I heard it I sobbed and had to stop everything I was doing. I think it is the theme of my heart.

Tiny Ruins – Me at the Museum, You in the Wintergardens

Tiny Ruins. This song hurts and mends me at the same time, every time I listen. I miss the place Hollie Fullbrook sings about, and am always partially there, even though I’ve never been there before. It has become fully real to me, the world of this song. This whole album transports me with unfathomable grace into one of the richest journeys of heartbreak I’ve ever felt. I hear in her writing an exquisite soul who isn’t afraid of loving after losing.

Katy Pinke is out now on Glamour Gowns. Look HERE for more information on Katy Pinke.