Kate Tucker has been making things her way for ten years now and her new album, Practical Sadness is the natural evolution of an artist weathering the inevitabilities of survival on the roller coaster of love and loss, and all the mundane moments in between.
“There’s no such thing as tomorrow and there’s not much left of today, you know all this joy and sorrow is gonna slip away…” she sings in the deliciously nostalgic “Dying on the Dance Floor.” If this sounds a touch morbid, by the time she gets through verse two, we see a little bit of bright shining light: “It’s high time I got my shades on, and who knows if it will last, but the future’s looking brighter than the past.” As far as this record is concerned, we’d agree.
Tucker made Practical Sadness her self-described “toughest year yet,” but she ended up with a record that is actually not at all heavy, partly due to the nature in which it was recorded. Low on cash and emotional energy, she decided the only way to lay down anything at all was to think like Lou Reed.
“My dear friend Kenny Childers and I had instantly bonded over our love for The Velvet Underground and our favorite thing to do together was pretend we were writing songs for their next record. We didn’t have any specific goal in mind; I knew I was going to make a new album soon, but I didn’t think I’d let myself do it this way.” By this way, Tucker means driving up to Bloomington, Indiana to record ten songs in two days in a basement somewhere in the middle of nowhere with some kind folks she’d never met, including Freda Love, who had taken a bus down from Chicago, sticks and snare drum in hand.
“It was fitting to return to the midwest to make this record. My mom had just died unexpectedly, so I’d been driving back and forth from Nashville to Akron all summer long. I just got in the car again, almost on autopilot and ended up in Indiana instead. Kenny said at one point, ‘You know…it’s that good old midwest practical sadness.’”And so Practical Sadness became a record of the processes of grief and renewal, in memory of Donna Jean Rossi, February 18 , 1957 – March 17, 2016.
Practical Sadness, the new full length release from Kate Tucker can be pre-ordered here—on vinyl.
