The Philadelphia Inquirer – Sunday 11/23/08
Regional ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
By Nicole Pensiero

We dig her On her dynamite new CD, The Coachman, local fave Kate Gaffney gets into swamp grooves, power pop
flourishes, country laments, and good bluesy folk.

It’s the place where she discovered her Muse and to where she’s since returned, but Sacramento, Calif.-based
artist Kate Gaffney will be home for Thanksgiving, with a holiday gift of her own.

Gaffney, formerly of Chalfont, will be at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia Friday night to celebrate the release
of her latest album “The Coachman.” Produced by Barrie Maguire (Natalie Merchant, The Wallflowers,
Amos Lee), the album is her second full-length disc, and in addition to her originals, features co-writes
with multi-instrumentalist Jackie Greene and Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter and musician Andrew
Lipke. Blending jam-band and Americana sensibilities with her soulful songwriting, it showcases Gaffney’s
knack for witty and honest lyrics rooted in the unpretentious folk traditions of the ’60s and ’70s.

She takes the Tin Angel stage, 20 S. Second St., at 10:30 p.m. Friday with Lipke and fellow Philadelphia
artist Chris Kasper as special guests. Before then, you can also catch Gaffney at noon Wednesday on WXPN
(88.5 FM), for an in-studio chat with host Helen Leicht.

By Rachel Leibrock - rleibrock@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, October 12, 2008
Story appeared in TICKET section, Page EXPLORE6


Kate Gaffney couldn't quite put her finger on it: What kind of music does she play exactly? The Sacramento-based singer found herself being asked that questions a million times over, but the answer was far from simple. It was country, yes, she reasoned, but a hybrid of rock, folk, swing, jazz and blues, too.

Then, just a few days ago, she figured it out. "I play American music – that just about covers it," Gaffney says.

"So many people see me and think, 'Oh it's a chick with a guitar' – how do you get past that?" she asks, pausing to reflect over the rhetorical questions. "I've never really been embraced by the folk community, but I'm not really rock either."

Gaffney, who performs Thursday at Harlow's, explores numerous sounds on a new album that deftly rides the lines between genres. With its rollicking beats, sunny melodies and intimate lyrics, "The Coachman" mirrors Gaffney's curious nature, easygoing charm and an endearing vulnerability.

This wasn't always the case. There was a point in Kate Gaffney's life when she didn't think much about music, about playing guitar, about whether her voice had a certain twang to it. The story of how the 29-year-old got to this point is wrapped up in the story of how she got to Sacramento and, thus, wrapped up in the very nature of her personality.

The Philadelphia native arrived in California around the turn of the century for a college internship in San Francisco. Eventually, she moved to Folsom to live with her then-boyfriend and work as a Child Protective Services social worker.But the job was physically exhausting and emotionally grueling, and domestic bliss was, well, not so blissful.
And then one night Gaffney went to see a friend's son play at the Blue Lamp, and everything changed. As Gaffney watched Jackie Greene on stage, she was mesmerized by the possibilities. She'd played guitar for years, ambling through favorite classic rock songs and the occasional Pearl Jam tune.

It had never really occurred to her, however, that she had a voice, that she could write songs, that she could do this. "Here was this kid my own age playing this music that I totally loved," she says now.
"I just had this epiphany and this idea that I could make music for living started to take shape." The young blues phenom encouraged Gaffney, and the epiphany eventually evolved into action. Gaffney quit her job, broke up with the boyfriend and moved to midtown to pursue music. She hit local bars and cafes to play open mikes, met other musicians and started writing songs.

After two years, she decided it wasn't enough and decided to return to Philadelphia. "It was kind of lonely out here; I had no real roots or ties," she says. "I wanted to have a support system." Gaffney took two months to ease back into life on the East Coast, playing at every open mike she could find between here and Pennsylvania. "It was grueling – I was by myself but it also helped me build up some confidence," she says. "It felt like a coming of age."

A chance encounter with Clifford Antone helped cement Gaffney's conviction. The owner of Antone's nightclub, known for helping launch Stevie Ray Vaughan's career, caught Gaffney busking on the street. "He just stopped and told me I was great," Gaffney says. Antone died in 2006, but his encouragement still resonates. "Whenever people come into your life like that, it's just validation for continuing on."
Back in Philly, Gaffney slowly built up a following, playing gigs and putting out a few records. Another chance encounter with Wallflowers bassist Barrie Maguire led to a Los Angeles studio where the two started working on "The Coachman. Gaffney had already decided she was ready to move west again and contemplated making L.A. or even San Francisco home.

Then she talked to Marty DeAnda. Gaffney met the Dig Records co-founder through Jackie Greene, and the two stayed in touch after she moved. Now, DeAnda urged the young singer to return to Sacramento and let him manage her career.

A big offer from a guy who wasn't even that impressed the first time he saw Gaffney play. "I didn't think she was that good," DeAnda says. "She was unpolished, pretty much status quo – there was nothing there that turned my head." Nothing, that is, except for Gaffney's breezy charisma.

"I was enamored with her," DeAnda says. "That's such a huge thing with Kate – her ability to reach you – she just flat out makes people like her." DeAnda kept watch, and in 2004 he asked her to open for Greene on a New Year's Eve show. Gaffney flew back to California on four days' notice. After the show, DeAnda knew she was the real thing. "She was so impressive, so much more grown-up," he says. "I could hear the changes in her songs and voice. She'd developed into a really good songwriter."

So when he learned that Gaffney was thinking of staying in California, DeAnda lobbied for Sacramento. "I said, you've got me, you've got a place to start," he says. That's all she needed to hear. "Being an artist can be so alienating," Gaffney says. "I've always been a self- promoter, I've always done it on my own – but I always wanted a team, too."

Jay Shaner sees Gaffney as a singer-songwriter on the verge. "I think Kate's at the beginning of her journey of her music career – she's still finding her voice and her ability." Shaner, who's watched Gaffney perform since her early open mike days in Sacramento, says it's the singer's voice that sets her apart. "A lot of female vocalists either have this really high, floaty voice that's very detached, or they're super- dramatic. Her voice lacks pretension – it's robust and genuine." It's so real, he says, that sometimes people don't know how to respond.

Now, Gaffney is eager to see how "The Coachman" will fare. There are plans to make a push for radio and play dates up and down the coast. Mostly, however, she's trying to practice a little patience. It gets hard, she admits, always worrying about how to pay her band, wondering if her record will make it into enough stores, hoping to get booked on the next great show. "I'm always thinking about the business side of it (but) that was my New Year's resolution this year – to be more patient. "Of course the New Year is almost over," she says with a laugh. "But it is about patience, being strong, believing in myself, knowing it won't happen overnight."

However long it takes, Gaffney says music is her only priority right now. Currently without a boyfriend, it's just too difficult, she says, to make time for anything other than her career. "I'm a hopeless romantic at heart and I am a little lonely sometimes," she admits. "But it's kind of hard to work dating around my schedule. "The only thing I can commit to right now is my music."

Singer-songwriter Kate Gaffney's new disc 'The Coachman' features the Pennsylvania native taking her rich, vulnerable-yet-feisty vocals to places only hinted at on her previous recordings.

The album opens with the gentle 'My Word,' a delicate one-minute snippet of a song which serves as a most inviting introduction. Gaffney's plaintive feathery vocal then morphs into the next cut; the sassy country-ish head bobber 'What Kind of Man.'

'Falls Bridge' is next and the shuffling bluesy number is one of the strongest on the album. The piano driven melody is infectious and Gaffney's soulful delivery is spot on.

The funky groove of 'Before I Go' is so wonderfully crafted it threatens to overshadow Gaffney's vocal, but she works her magic and pulls it off. Fellow Dig artist Jackie Greene adds his considerable musical chops to 'The Coachman' and although Gaffney is definitely no slouch as a songwriter, the Greene-penned 'The Ballad of Sleepy John' is the best track on the disc.




Gaffney dusts off Woody Guthrie's 'Philadelphia Lawyer' and weaves the tale with folksy conviction. The title cut closes out the disc and as it clocks in at 18 plus minutes, there was a real danger of it devolving into a navel-gazing, self-indulgent snoozer, but instead it eases the listener out gracefully with a jammin' slow burn.

'The Coachman' features well-crafted songs delivered with passion and conviction by an up and coming singer/songwriter whose artistry will turn heads.

Every year around late summer, I think about Elvis.

The man some called the King died in the middle of August 1977 at age 42. And while he’d turned into a bloated, drug-saturated caricature in his twilight years; and he’d made a ton of crummy movies in the 1960s, albeit followed by a swell comeback from 1968–70; what comes to mind when I think about the man from Tupelo is his meteoric rise. And, also, how his early music was a wicked brew that resulted from the various musical components swirling around his psyche: blues, black- and white-gospel forms, country, even crooner pop.

That collision of seemingly unreconcilable musical forms has been at the heart of a lot of great music—the Beatles, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Prince—and present-day acts such as Beck and My Morning Jacket. Even the much-maligned Grateful Dead drew from such seemingly disparate genres as rock, blues, jug-band folk, country and various world-music forms.

But not every artist finds his or her muse in such alchemical pursuits. For some, the call of the familiar is more powerful, and the ingredients that go into their particular musical soufflé are drawn from more narrow parameters.

Now, 1977 wasn’t just the year Elvis died, or the year that punk broke—an explosion that gave us the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, Elvis Costello and a raft of other greats. That year also was the heyday of such record labels as Warner Bros./Reprise and Elektra/Asylum, when the Southern California songwriter aesthetic was in full flower.

Nothing on Kate Gaffney’s new album, The Coachman, reminds me of the kind of roiling multigenre tumult that birthed an Elvis—Presley or Costello—but the very well crafted 10-song set may be the best goddamn Bonnie Raitt album I’ve heard in a really long time.

Gaffney, a Philadelphia transplant who’s signed to local label Dig Music, which seems to have a real affinity for this style of music, has a lovely voice, a mature alto that doesn’t sound cutesy-dusky in the way that so many female singer-songwriters do these days. She writes songs that ring comfortably familiar, but differ enough to sound like she isn’t locked into writing the same song over and over. In fact, her compositions are each quite distinct.

Still, as much as I adore this album, it sounds like the work of someone whose record collection probably doesn’t contain too many surprises.

Produced in Los Angeles by Barrie Maguire, another Philly native who played bass with such adult-contemporary/Americana staples as the Wallflowers and Natalie Merchant, The Coachman opens with the minute-long and breathy “My Word” and closes with the title track at 18 minutes-plus, an elegiac steel-guitar and organ-laced meditation. The eight songs in between are mostly in the four- to five-minute range, with organ-laced chick gospel (“What Kind of Man”), Allen Toussaint-style N’awlins percussive funk-granola hybrids (“Falls Bridge,” “Before I Go”), finger-style folk (“Mighty Ship”), a couple of waltzes (“Give It a Whirl,” “Philadelphia Lawyer”), a Band-like Arcadian plaint (“The Ballad of Sleepy John”) and a reggae-flavored pop tune (“Fallen for the Road”).

Gaffney is backed on the disc by Jackie Greene, another artist with a decided affinity for post-Blonde on Blonde Americana, along with jam-band staples Steve and John Kimock and Ben Harper’s band the Innocent Criminals.

Although The Coachman is slated for an October release with a release party at Harlow’s, she’s also playing that same venue on Thursday, September 4, sharing a bill with labelmate Sal Valentino, who will be playing with a band and string section. If it’s anything like his Palms show last spring, it’s not to be missed.

By Jackson Griffith
trustyourears@newsreview.com