Katherine Perkins to Release HELPLESS LOVE Single with Animated Video
The Maine artist's upcoming LP draws comparisons to Lucinda Williams, Aldous Harding, and Karen Dalton.
Katherine Perkins is set to release 'Helpless Love,' a single from her upcoming album of the same name, featuring an animated video. The Maine-based singer-songwriter's forthcoming record draws comparisons to Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Aldous Harding, Wilco, Randy Newman, Laura Marling, and Karen Dalton.
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.
Perkins' first solo record, Being Younger, was primarily an album about friendships and getting older; with Helpless Love, Perkins says she was trying to take a step back and look at humans with a wider lens, 'because so much of what we do is so baffling to me. I wrote 'Ghost Town' in a sparsely inhabited former mining town in Arizona after an early morning encounter with a person who seemed plausibly to be more spirit than real. 'To the Moon' is tender-hearted but wry, gently chiding would-be Mars dwellers not to give up on earth. On 'Molecules' I'm contending with the question of whether anything new or original can be created or said in such a content-saturated world.' Along those lines, Perkins says, 'there's a thread running through a lot of these songs of pushing against my own internal currents of despair and futility, finding reasons to keep doing and making and writing things, even when the math doesn't totally add up.'
'Phoenix,' Perkins says was that rare type of song where the lyrics poured out all at once. Leading up to the 2024 election, she began to take irrational comfort in the idea of witches, feminine powers, dark when necessary, connected through the ages, through so many eras of oppression and darkness –– 'I imagined, not entirely unseriously, that on election day we'd have all of history's good witches behind us, a steady presence from the spirit realm to help us topple the evil forces of this one. Of course it's clear to me in retrospect that I wasn't exactly 'well' in that stretch –– who among us was? But in the aftermath, having been abandoned by the witches that I'd only recently willed into existence in my mind, I found myself at my piano in a new cold clear reality; 'Phoenix' poured itself out into the desolation I was feeling. It was the closest brush I ever had with finding –– and losing –– religion.'
'Impossible Things' was the last song to make it onto the record. Perkins sent the band a voice memo the day before they went into the studio –– and it was the first song recorded, as a warm-up. That take is the one that made it to the record. Like a lot of songs, 'The Long Way' started out as one thing and became another; in this case, initially a song for a friend who'd had a dream fall through. But it ended up speaking to something else which Perkins identifies as 'my own struggles to make peace with the circuitous non-mountainous nature of my career trajectory.' 'Swiftly' is kind of a cinematic lullaby for the end of an era — it's last call at the bar of our youth. 'Helpless Love,' the title track, is a return to earth from all the ethereal reaches of the album; it's raucous and full-hearted and anthemic. 'The witches make an appearance,' Perkins says, 'but they don't have much effect; at the end of the day, it's a straight-up love song.'
About Katherine Perkins
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).
Band Credits
Band arrangements by Katherine Perkins, Jonathan Henderson, Ryan Blotnick, Rebecca Lasaponaro and Danny Fisher-Lochhead
Rebecca Lasaponaro (Rubblebucket; And The Kids) –– Drums, Background Vocals, Percussion
Ross Gallagher (Paula Cole; Madeleine Peyroux) — Electric and Upright Bass, Background Vocals
.jpg?format=auto&width=300)
