Miles Morrisseau
ICT
TORONTO, Canada — Katherine Paul stopped in at Toronto’s legendary Horseshoe Tavern on tour for her critically acclaimed new album, “The Land, The Water and The Sky.”
The crowd lined up early to get into the back room where everyone from Hank Williams to The Rolling Stones and another Indigenous guitar hero, Link Wray, has played.
Paul, Swinomish/Inupiaq, who describes herself as a “radical, Indigenous, queer feminist,” performs as Black Belt Eagle Scout, a genre-bending, note-shredding guitar hero whose new record has been dubbed a “tour de force” by Rolling Stone magazine.
This night in mid-April, Paul takes to the iconic Horseshoe stage where the early crowd is split with a younger, more diverse audience standing near the stage, and the older, more male music nerds taking good seats and tables.
The night would be reminiscent of Wray, the ground-breaking Shawnee musician whose search for new sounds to squeeze out of his Gibson Les Paul led him to poking holes in his amp and creating the distortion that was the foundation of heavy rock, punk and metal. His epic 1958 single, “Rumble,” remains the only instrumental song banned on U.S. radio.
“Guitar is the central focus of my music,” Paul told ICT by phone three days later before an April 14 performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It’s the first instrument that I write with, the only instrument that I write with. Guitar, and then sing, and then everything else comes after that.”
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The new album, released in February by the independent Saddle Creek record label, is drawing rave reviews as Paul embarks on a three-month tour of the U.S. and Canada. The tour picks up June 2 in Denver and includes stops in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Vermont, Manitoba and Central Park in New York City before returning to her home base in Portland, Oregon, on Aug. 13.
Influential music review site, Pitchfork, a critics’ darling, loved all her albums and put this one on its list of most anticipated albums of 2023.
“A voice that unfurls from another and perhaps a better world,” raved PopWorld critic John Amen.
Going home
From start to finish, the evening at the Horseshoe Tavern was a celebration of the guitar.
KP, as her tour mates call her, was on the road with a different line-up of musicians, including Claire Glass and Adobo. Both are skilled guitar players who conduct their own unique take on the instrument’s versatility. Glass plays in a classical style and achieves a number of high points with her delicate but determined picking and strumming. Adobo looped his voice and guitar into a funky kaleidoscope of sound that gave his guitar a delightful landscape to play within.
Both musicians said they are expressing work in a new artistic direction as solo artists and received cheers from the supportive audience.
The new album is also a step in an artistic evolution for Paul, who found inspiration upon returning home to ride out the pandemic on Swinomish lands in Washington State, where she grew up.
“I made this record because I moved back home,” she said. “And being home and being around all of the trees and all of the water and everything played a big part in the last couple of years in my life.”
She continued, “It also happened to be the pandemic, where we couldn’t come together as much. And so, in a way, I was kind of forced to go outside and forced to go back to certain things that were very fundamental in the original identity of who I am.”
The experiences formed the basis for the new album.
“I spent a lot of time doing really nice things, spent a lot of time just going out into the forest, being on the water,” she said. “And it was really peaceful. And it was really nice. And it really stuck with me … A lot of the songs just sort of ended up being about those experiences.”
Returning home to share knowledge following a period of time learning and experiencing the outside world is part of the Swinomish traditions.
“Where I’m from, a lot of people are encouraged to go off of our reservation and get an education and to get job experience and to have life experience and then come back and share that with the community,” Paul said.
“The timing of coming back wasn’t really what I had planned,” Paul said. “Initially, I was going to come back probably in a couple of years from now. But when the pandemic was happening my parents were sort of needing extra care. And I wanted to move somewhere where I wasn’t kind of cooped up in a small apartment, which was what my situation was in Portland. And so, yeah, I made this journey back home.”
Musical balancing act
The show at the Horseshoe Tavern kicks off like the album, with the guitar-heavy distortion of “My Blood Runs Through This Land.” The words are difficult to pick up, rising up like fog on the water, tiptoeing along the line between the land, the water and the sky.
I know you speak through me I
Feel it in the sound of water
Touching all the rocks I feel
No one can take
This moment away
The show is dominated by songs from the new album, which Paul makes clear early into the show. The crowd cheers; they are clearly up for wherever Black Belt Eagle Scout is going to go.
Paul plays nearly every song on the new album and it does not disappoint. So much of the beauty and power of the work is how the songs build or shift from whisper to scream, within the space of Paul’s guitar and voice
One of the lead singles, “Nobody,” is a perfect example of Paul’s compelling balancing act that makes her music so addictive. It gets in your bones.
Yeah, I feel it in my bones
Like the lines you carve for me
And it moves right through my skin
I can hear it in the breeze
The accompanying video is gorgeous and heartbreaking. Directed by Evan Benally Atwood, Diné, it shows in a few brief images the story of so many Indigenous women who have lost or been separated from their children. It speaks to the reality in many communities where the generational efforts to destroy and break apart nations reverberates everyday.
Paul’s return home and the isolation not only inspired new songs, however. It also inspired a willingness to open herself up to collaboration. She may write all her songs on guitar, but she is a talented, multi-instrumentalist who plays all the instruments on her first two records, “Mother of My Children,” released in 2018, and 2019’s “At the Party with my Brown Friends,” including bass, drums, keyboards, piano, vibraphone and more.
“It’s one of those things where I’ve never collaborated,” Paul told the Horseshoe crowd. “And so it was like stepping out of my element. And it turns out, it’s really great.”
The song, “Spaces,” from the new album, is the glorious expression of what those additional musicians and voices can add to the Black Belt Eagle Scout sound. It is also reflective of her alchemy of divergent sounds — in this case, the traditional Swinomish vocals provided by her parents, Ken and Pat Paul, and the classical stylings of three string players on violins and cello.
Paul admits that the tour is a grind, but she is committed to getting the music out.
“We have this big, big year built around just kind of showcasing the songs to people, and having a space where people can come and listen,” Paul said.
“I feel really grateful that that is a thing that I can do in my life. You know, you came to the show, that other people came to the show, because that exists.”
Black Belt Eagle Scout
Tour info
Katherine Paul and Black Belt Eagle Scout will be touring all summer across the United States and Canada with the release of the acclaimed new album, “The Land, The Water and The Sky,” from the independent Saddle Creek label. The tour kicks off in Denver on June 2, returns to Canada for the Winnipeg Folk Festival on July 7 and finishes up for the summer on Aug. 13 with a performance back in Paul’s home territory at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregon. Here are the tour dates so far:
*June 2: Denver, Colorado; Lost Lake Lounge
*June 3: Salt Lake City, Utah; Utah Pride
*June 4: Los Angeles, California; OUTLOUD Festival
*July 6: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; Winnipeg Folk Festival
*July 14: South Burlington, Vermont; Higher Ground Ballroom, with Australian performer Julia Jacklin
*July 16: Buffalo, New York; Asbury Hall Babeville, with Australian performer Julia Jacklin
*July 17: Cleveland Heights, Ohio; Grog Shop, with Australian performer Julia Jacklin
*July 19: New York City; SummerStage in Central Park
*July 22: Chicago, Illinois; Pitchfork Music Festival
*July 27: Carnation, Washington; Timber!
*July 29: Omaha, Nebraska; Maha Festival
*Aug. 13: Portland, Oregon; Pioneer Courthouse Square
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