Karl Blau: Lessons in Luck and Hope

On a chilly December night, Seattle’s Tractor Tavern transformed into a cozy oasis—not only because the venue is indoors and heated, but also thanks to singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Karl Blau’s life-affirming music. I’d arrived on my own, waiting for a friend to join me, when I bumped into my high school choir teacher, who I hadn’t seen in over a decade. To be honest, I haven’t even properly lived in Seattle for more than summers during college or a couple months in early lockdown out in the ‘burbs, so running into someone I knew seemed unlikely in the first place. The serendipity immediately gave the night a homey touch, one that was amplified by the ramshackle tenderness of Blau’s songs.

“Karl is so prolific,” my former teacher told me, after explaining that the two were old friends, “He’s probably written thousands of songs.” The pair had met in Bellingham, Washington, a little hippie college town just across the border from Canada and home to Western Washington University. My teacher had been part of the post-punk jam band Krusters Kronomid, which featured Death Cab for Cuties’ Jason McGerr on drums, and they’d been an inspiration to Blau, who was a part of the outfit Captain Fathom at the time. In the years since, he’s worked with other artists on some 250 albums, including releases by Earth, The Microphones, Laura Veirs, Matthew E. White and Arrington de Dionyso (whose Indonesian music project Malaikat Dan Singa is one of Blau’s personal favorites). 

Blau’s vast solo catalog—some 14 LPs released over nearly three decades—made the start of his Tractor Tavern show that night all the more impressive: He went up solo and took requests. Sometimes he fumbled slightly, or asked audience members to prompt him with the start of a lyric, but it was a welcome bridge for people familiar with his older work before Blau’s band came out and the ensemble delved into his newest release, the folk-rock (with touches of blues, funk and pop) album Vultures of Love, released in October of this year via Otherly Love Records. Blau and his band—“a bunch of Germantown cats,” he tells me later in an interview—radiated an incredible sense of connection with each other that extended into the audience. It was the type of music that enveloped you with its warmth, and I found myself feeling lit up from the inside like one of those kitschy plastic snowmen in people’s front yards. The off-kilter instrumental playfulness of “The Heavy Light of Sad & Dance” immediately brought to mind early The Go! Team, while the irresistible grooves and easy harmonies of “Back on Track”—aptly described as “a sort of junkyard pop” in a press release—made that number a clear stand out. 

“It’s just a party,” Blau says of that particular song when we chat a few days later over Zoom, after the band’s performance in Olympia, Washington. “Last night, this 80-year-old dude got on the dance floor and just tore it up on ‘Back on Track.’”

“I thought that Seattle show was the best show we ever played, but literally every show has just gotten better and better musically as we’re exploring these songs and loosening up and tidying up and just breaking down those walls of what we thought the song was and rebuilding it again on stage,” Blau explains. 

Touring in the Pacific Northwest was a homecoming for Blau, who for a long time was a staple of the Anacortes music scene. Anacortes is a small town of around 17,500 people, an hour-and-a-half drive north of Seattle on Fidalgo Island. It’s the type of place with “a band for all seasons,” as he puts it—one of its famous former residents is Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie and Microphones fame—and Anacortes has a reputation for being an artistic paradise where musicians lift each other up. Blau and his family lived in the same house in old town Anacortes for 13 years, and one of his daughters was actually born in the living room. He started a group called Moon Raw during his time there, inspired by the philosophies of pioneering experimental jazz musician Sun Ra. Blau and other musicians would meet on Monday nights and spend at least an hour playing together, splitting the time into thirds. 

“The first 20 minutes were gentle and easy, sort of getting into the spirit. The second third was free and open, with loose time signatures or multiple time signatures—things on top of each other that just created a space that was floating and weightless, not bound by tempos,” Blau recalls, “And then the final 20 minutes were an energetic send off… 20 minutes is a bit of time to spend in each one of those places, so it would really tease out these moments and ideas. Sometimes we’d go around the clock twice if we were just really feeling it.”

This improvisational approach partly informed Vultures of Love, which Blau recorded in his new home of Germantown, in Northwest Philadelphia. His landlord in Anacortes decided to sell the house that meant so much to Blau and his family, so he and his wife Calli made a big move to the East Coast in order to give their daughters a more diverse upbringing (Anacortes is very white). 

Luck seemed to be on their side; a friend of a friend was looking for a young artistic family to help out by renting out their place in Germantown for cheap, and that house just so happened to be near VintaDelphia, a mid-century modern furniture warehouse run by Blau’s future collaborator, Chris Covatta. Unfortunately, everything shut down about a year after they arrived in Germantown due to COVID, but eventually Blau found that same sense of musical community in Pennsylvania that he’d known back home. He and Covatta—who plays guitar, synth, bass and percussion on the album—got to know each other over the years and ended up cobbling together a studio in the VintaDelphia warehouse. They even installed a fireplace in the space so they could play there during the frigid winter months. 

“We started recording around the fireplace, and that’s how the record came to be, in a sense, Vultures of Love. There was like this dusty eight track in the corner that we figured out six and a half channels work on, so we kind of built the studio around that,” Blau recalls. 

On previous projects, Blau had primarily worked solo, but this time around, he welcomed in an eclectic cast of collaborators. There was Covatta (Blau: “The two of us were kind of getting into it, into that space of first take, best take, throwing spaghetti at the wall.”) and Dave Flaherty, the latter of whom plays drums in Cuddle Magic and VAMBI. Flaherty and Blau connected through the record label Otherly Love, and the Brooklyn drummer came to the studio to improvise and jam. With Flaherty behind the drumkit and Blau on bass, something magical happened. 

“I had these vague ideas of a feeling that I wanted to do tempo-wise, and Dave is just so musical on the drums. He just really brought the moment. And so through the inspiration of each other, we improvised these things that I didn’t even cut up later. They just ended up being the backbones of the songs,” Blau tells me. All of the tracks on Vultures of Love were originally only bass and drums, then Blau spent the winter fleshing out the rest, with occasional contributions from Corvatta. It took Blau some time to trust a collaborator’s suggestions; for so long he had worked alone. Eventually, though, he tells me, “it just started turning into me getting excited about what Chris’s ideas would be.”

Vultures of Love veers slightly away from the country sound of Blau’s last record, 2022’s Love & Harm, though slide guitar, harmonica and the whiskey-warm twang in his voice continue that musical thread in the new album somewhat. The unassuming guitar and wistful harmonica of “Bee Song” open Vultures of Love, and Blau considers the track an overture of sorts, forming a sonic bridge between this release and the last and sowing the seeds of the album’s themes. 

“This record really is about connecting with the world, the spiritual,” Blau says, later elaborating, “leaning into connecting with spirit and the earth sounds sort of hippie, but I really feel like the antidote to this world we’ve created is holding space for your connection to beauty and the possibilities of connecting to—I don’t know how else to put it—the spirit.” The folksiness of “Bee Song” is juxtaposed with plinking electronic sounds at the tail end, tipping us off that Vultures of Love will lead us down some unexpected aural avenues.

The next track, “Pasadena,” follows in the country vein, looking back on the end of a friendship: “Pasadena / Just look at what has come between us.” Despite its melancholy subject matter, the song has the comforting familiarity of an old, much-loved pair of jeans. The smooth harmonies of Stephanie Cole and Christa Joy Atkins—both of whom were on tour with Blau—round out “Pasadena” beautifully. 

The synth-flecked blues number “Taxes” critiques the American government’s inherent violence and our own complicity, as our tax dollars fund horrors like the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. “People can we make peace and love / While paying our taxes?” Blau asks, and it feels like a pointed follow-up to Ilya Kaminsky’s gut-wrenching poem “We Lived Happily During the War.”

However, there is an undeniable hope that buoys Vultures of Love. Blau’s 13-year-old daughter, Poppy, appropriately adds guest vocals to the uplifting album closer “For the Babies.” Her voice is winsome and light, perfectly complementing Blau’s world-weary tones. “She was totally game. I thought that her voice would be a really fun treat for the listener, because she’s so in touch with the moment. I wanted the voice in that section to be this child asking the universe for permission or agency,” Blau says. The song sees him imparting nuggets of wisdom to a younger generation, like the importance of trusting yourself (“Just don’t get sucked in / To another’s viewpoint / And turn away from your own”) and his philosophy that we should celebrate the new year in March. “March is such a great word like to start the year off, like, ‘March, go!’ And spring is happening,” Blau explains. I’m inclined to agree with him, especially his notion that it’s easier to keep resolutions if they don’t come immediately after the overwhelming rush of the holiday season. 

Like with many artists I interview these days, our discussion eventually turns to capitalism, especially since Blau is a working class musician. I forget to record the second half of our conversation (Zoom Premium, you will never have my money), so he recaps his thoughts over email at a later date: “The emphasis is always on fending for yourself in capitalism as I understand it. Survival of the strongest, destroy the weak.” He tells me how harrowing it is “looking at the streaming numbers and seeing thousands of people listening to your music each month and you can’t pay your rent—a psychologically relentless environment for musicians right now.”

As always, the best ways to support artists is to got to their shows and buy merchandise. Blau has gone the way of Bandcamp and Patreon, too: “You can sign up to Bandcamp for only $5 a year and Patreon is $1 a month and knock your socks off with 60 or so albums of mine.”

“I really want the ‘many hands make light work’ model to work for me, I don’t want to burden anyone, but I need to be supported,” Blau writes in an email, “I have way too many plans to keep pushing a lawn mower.”

Clare Martin is a cemetery enthusiast and Paste’s associate music editor.