Los Angeles-via-Wichita Americana artist Katie Jo is gearing up to release her debut album, Pawn Shop Queen, this spring. While she’s a relative newcomer to the scene, she makes up for it in life experience. You can hear it in her voice—sweet yet road-weary, a contemporary torchbearer for classic country stars like Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Her lyrics tell the tale of a woman who’s had her heart broken more than once but still stands strong.
Pawn Shop Queen—out April 9—tackles themes at the dark heart of country music: infidelity, religion, depression. But what sets Katie Jo apart is her ability to tackle taboo subjects like infertility and abortion with honesty and rawness. The catalyst for her new record came four years ago while she was going through a trying period in her personal life.
“When I was 26,” Katie Jo explains, “I was diagnosed with a condition called a bicornuate uterus, which means my uterus didn’t form properly. At the time, a lot of my friends were starting to think about having kids, and I’d always assumed I’d go down that path, too. Then I got this news, but the doctor didn’t really give me a lot of information, just kind of brushed it aside and was very dismissive of my questions about how it would impact my life. When you’re a young woman, just a woman in general, a lot of times when you try to get medical advice, you’re either dismissed or people don’t explain all the things that can go wrong.”
“I was in a really low place for a lot of years. But once I started writing and performing, it was an escape from this pit of despair I was hiding in. The songs for Pawn Shop Queen came out of that period. While it’s not a black & white diary entry of the events, the record really encapsulates cynicism and emotional isolation.”
Before heartbreak hit and other tribulations hit, Katie Jo was cutting her teeth picking banjo on the bluegrass scene. As she evolved down the path toward country and Americana, she discovered a warm and supportive music scene in her adopted hometown of Los Angeles. Like country rebel Dwight Yoakam, Katie Jo has made a name for herself playing unconventional venues like punk clubs and even boxing gyms (in between picking songs, Katie Jo is also an avid student of boxing and martial arts). Having whipped her songs into shape in front of a variety of audiences, an album was the next logical step.
For Pawn Shop Queen, Katie Jo worked with Chris Schlarb at Ego Studios in Long Beach. She met Schlarb through her pedal steel player, session musician George Madrid. Schlarb assembled an impressive cast to play on the record, which was tracked live in just three days.
Glide is premiering the resplendent single “How Soon,” that encapsulates the bygone early Nashville scene with a brave modern Americana flair. Katie Jo boasts charismatically confident vocals and with a shuffle and swing backbeat, creating a smoky portrait of country’s golden years.
Katie Jo explains her inspiration behind the song in more detail…
How Soon” is a nod to classic country love-’em-and-leave-’em road-dog songs, only the boot is on the other foot. A lot of times, male singers—especially in country music—glorify the road life, where breaking a lover’s heart is just an afterthought… unfortunate but acceptable collateral damage. It’s a story we hear over and over again—and often sung as a badge of honor. You never really get to hear from all the lovers they leave in their wake, and that’s what I wanted to do with this song—while poking a little fun in the process.
It draws from some short-term relationships I’ve experienced that have burned pretty intensely at first, only to have the other person vanish quickly and without warning. Of course, after a while, you get a little better at anticipating the pattern. With this song, I wanted to turn the tables and show that the unique “call of the road” is a bit of a cliche I can see coming from a mile away now. A sort of takes-one-to-know-one story.
“How Soon” was one of the first songs we tracked for the record. The whole thing was a whirlwind three-day session at Big Ego Studios in Long Beach, Calif. My producer Chris Schlarb really dug into the instrumentation and engineering style of classic country songs as we were planning the record. The song was built around the bouncing, Johnny Cash-style guitar riff played by Davin Givhan, and the chugging drums and bass of John Miranda & Anthony Shadduck. It created this continual movement in the song that mirrors the theme of the lyrics. George Madrid’s pedal steel and Nathan Hubbard’s vibraphone playing added sharp accents, too—the sonic equivalent of pointing fingers, which the narrator is 100 percent doing in this song.”
Website & Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/
https://twitter.com/katie_jo_
https://www.instagram.com/
https://open.spotify.com/
