her music...subtle, simple, that's all!
Kat Edmonson is a
buoyant singer-songwriter from Texas
whose tiny stature
belies a powerful voice.
She makes smart,
familiar pop; though steeped in vintage tradition,
her style leans
left of center.
Kat’s biggest
strength is her rich vocal control:
alternately coy,
elegant, and poignant,
she often shifts
tone effortlessly from one note to another,
and she’s not
afraid to leave in
the occasional
touch of gravel in her recordings.
The singer is
exceptionally present both on her albums and in concert.
She’s performed
with Willie Nelson, opened for Smokey Robinson,
toured with Boz
Scaggs and Lyle Lovett,
and headlined the
Taichung Jazz Festival in Taiwan.
She also recorded
"Baby It's Cold Outside" with Lovett
for his new album
Release Me (Feb 28, 2012).
Now splitting her
time between Austin and NYC,
Kat is eager to
release her second record, Way Down Low.
She hopes it will
be "a launching pad to play all over the world
and travel
wherever I can."
Growing up an only
child with a single mom,
the singer spent a
lot of time daydreaming and avidly absorbing
her mother’s
collection of old movies and records.
"School was
really agony for me," she says.
When she wasn’t
writing songs in class, she would skip school
and drive around
for hours on end, listening to Neil Young,
Carly Simon, Frank
Sinatra, etc.
This private
communion with some of the musical greats,
her heroes, was
her true education.
Kat was a
contestant on the 2nd season of American Idol
and was eliminated
when Randy Jackson told her she didn’t look like a star.
She left Hollywood
for Austin in search of her musical home.
There, she started
attending open mic nights at a club called the
Elephant Room and
met a vast array of local players to collaborate with.
These new-found
relationships allowed Kat to begin playing regularly
in the scene and
she soon became a well-known success.
Her 2009 record,
Take To The Sky, is an homage to songwriters.
Kat says the
record was "me trying to question
what a standard
actually is, and what popular music is;
taking tunes and
using them as canvases for self expression."
On it she
re-interprets such storied works as "Summertime"
alongside more
recent pop gems such as The Cardigans’
"Lovefool"
and The Cure’s "Just Like Heaven".
