Katherine Perkins is a Maine-based singer, songwriter and painter. As a visual artist she builds texture and color through the use of mixed media: acrylic, collage, ink and colored pencil combine to create rich and varied surfaces from which abstract geometric forms emerge. As a musician, she performs with the Soulbenders, out of Brooksville, ME, and in her own self-titled project. Living in Brooklyn, NY, in the early-mid 2010s, Perkins cut her musical teeth playing grimy basement shows with a cohort of fellow Maine transplants in the debaucherous psych-pop band Harvey Eyeballs. Many of the same musicians moonlit as the band behind Katherine’s chiller sister-project, Rose Hips & Ships, with which she released her first full-length album, The Seafarer, in 2013, and The Colors Now, in 2020, following her move back to Maine. Her debut solo record, Being Younger, released on Twelve | Eight Records in June, 2024, was called “ageless and warmhearted” (the Autumn Roses) and “a trove of genre-defying ballads” (DownEast).
Coming September 25
Katherine Perkins' Helpless Love is an album about love and spirits, ghosts and witches, mysterious powers and the things we can and can’t control. It’s about the mysterious fabric holding everything together and questions about the plan, or lack thereof, of the whole cosmos. It’s also a pretty good time.
There are elements of the Americana worlds of Lucinda Williams and Bonnie Raitt, flashes of bizarro humor in the galaxy of Aldous Harding, and something higher-octane that’s hard to put a finger on. For this, her second full-length album, Perkins wrote the songs on piano and recorded them on Wurlitzer. Her band brought a host of musical upbringings and influences to the table, from indie-pop to folk to soul to jazz, and the result is an unplaceable hybrid that is both fresh and deeply familiar.
The songs on Being Younger emerged in fits and starts, mostly sitting at the jangly piano in my living room, dreaming about collaboration from the vantage point of pandemic isolation. I heard drums and bass and horns and Read more
The songs on Being Younger emerged in fits and starts, mostly sitting at the jangly piano in my living room, dreaming about collaboration from the vantage point of pandemic isolation. I heard drums and bass and horns and vocal harmonies, guitar and organ and lots of tambourine (my favorite weakness). I heard insistent grooves –– I was dreaming up music that people could dance to, a strange vision in that moment of time.
The songs on this album are personal reflections on the extended weird time we’ve been living in, and on the search for light around the edges. It’s an album about getting older, about making peace with past failures, about saying goodbye to various youthful fantasies about how things would turn out.
It’s also an album about finding solidarity and friendship amidst the wild weather of these times. One of the great things about getting older is the deepening of old friendships and many of these songs are written as love letters to dear friends, trying to help pull them through tough moments. A couple songs are trying out that level of compassion on myself. Generally they’re calls for togetherness in a time of isolation; they’re songs about pain with hope and light at their core.
We recorded all ten songs in a three-day marathon session in Portland, Maine in August 2022. It was a miracle of logistics; old bandmates had come in from New York and Louisiana and Massachusetts and Amsterdam; we all stayed focused, nobody got covid and we recorded everything that we intended to. At some point in the recording studio I looked around the room and realized that I’d been friends with everyone there for at least ten years, collaborating with many of them since high school band class. I think you can hear those old bonds come through in the music; there’s elation at getting to play together again, after spending two forever pandemic years apart.
The songs on this album are personal reflections on the extended weird time we’ve been living in, and on the search for light around the edges. It’s an album about getting older, about making peace with past failures, about saying goodbye to various youthful fantasies about how things would turn out.
It’s also an album about finding solidarity and friendship amidst the wild weather of these times. One of the great things about getting older is the deepening of old friendships and many of these songs are written as love letters to dear friends, trying to help pull them through tough moments. A couple songs are trying out that level of compassion on myself. Generally they’re calls for togetherness in a time of isolation; they’re songs about pain with hope and light at their core.
We recorded all ten songs in a three-day marathon session in Portland, Maine in August 2022. It was a miracle of logistics; old bandmates had come in from New York and Louisiana and Massachusetts and Amsterdam; we all stayed focused, nobody got covid and we recorded everything that we intended to. At some point in the recording studio I looked around the room and realized that I’d been friends with everyone there for at least ten years, collaborating with many of them since high school band class. I think you can hear those old bonds come through in the music; there’s elation at getting to play together again, after spending two forever pandemic years apart.
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Being Younger 3:570:00/3:57
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Go Your Own Way 3:360:00/3:36
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Day by Day 4:460:00/4:46
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Lay it Down 3:020:00/3:02
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Hold On 4:090:00/4:09
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City Nights 4:330:00/4:33
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Morning Morning 4:350:00/4:35
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Summer's End 4:050:00/4:05
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Sea Change 4:300:00/4:30
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Valley of Loss 4:400:00/4:40
Being Younger
The songs on this album are poetic personal reflections on the extended weird time we’ve been living in, and on the search for light around the edges. It’s an album about getting older, about making peace with past failures, about saying goodbye to various youthful fantasies about how things would turn out.
It’s also an album about finding solidarity and friendship amidst the wild weather of these times. One of the great things about getting older is the deepening of old friendships and many of these songs are written as love letters to dear friends, trying to help pull them through tough moments. A couple songs are trying out that level of compassion on myself. Generally they’re calls for togetherness in a time of isolation; they’re songs about pain with hope and light at their core.
We recorded all ten songs in a three-day marathon session in Portland, Maine in August 2022. It was a miracle of logistics; old bandmates had come in from New York and Louisiana and Massachusetts and Amsterdam; we all stayed focused, nobody got covid and we recorded everything that we intended to. At some point in the recording studio I looked around the room and realized that I’d been friends with everyone there for at least ten years, collaborating with many of them since high school band class. I think you can hear those old bonds come through in the music; there’s elation at getting to play together again, after spending two forever pandemic years apart.