Kate Bollinger Emerges at Long Last

Kate Bollinger’s debut album, Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind, is a summertime sojourn, with sugary choruses wrapped around a warmth you can only get when the sun is beating down. Pressing play on songs like “What’s This About (La La La La)” and “Any Day Now” is like accepting an invitation into laughter and mischief and romance. The record is totally Hollywood, with a treble of excess popping every stitch. Across 40 minutes, the colors burst, especially reds, and a grainy kind of oeuvre unspools merrily while we follow Bollinger’s gentle warble across Tinseltown’s postcard haunts. But not even Bollinger’s declaration that “winter spawns inside of me” at the dawn of Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind can ice down the putrid stink of the 100-degree heat washed over Los Angeles when I link up with her on a Monday afternoon.

We’re meeting up for a late lunch at an eatery with a name that my sun-baked brain has already purged out of my memory; it’s one of those spots with no air conditioning to be found, because it’s technically an outside restaurant with a roof over it. We play it cool by ordering cold drinks and, in theory, grabbing the best seats in the house: a two-person table stationed in the path of a rusting fan. No dice, it’s actually just pushing warm air in our direction. Maybe there’s a reason why Bollinger and I are the only people there; nobody with any sense would dare boil alive at a brunch spot on a Monday, of all days. My Ohio skin isn’t used to the sores of a West Coast scorcher, but Bollinger is used to it by now.

She moved to Los Angeles from Virginia two years ago, having spent the first eras of her life in and around Charlottesville, where she was raised and, eventually, went to college. At the time of our conversation, Bollinger’s first friend, whom she met when they were both babies, is in town and staying with her. “We were talking about Charlottesville yesterday and trying to describe what’s so amazing about it, because we’re both obsessed with it,” Bollinger explains. “But it’s this unexplainable thing about a town.” Those of us with a casual knowledge about Charlottesville likely remember that the Dave Matthews Band hail from there, but Bollinger contends that the buck doesn’t stop with the “Crash” singer and Kinzie Street Bridge phenomenon. “There was so much cool art and music happening when we were little,” she says. “There was this show house called Magnolia House, there was a venue called Tea Bazaar, the Gravity Lounge—so many venues and kids playing shows and making art.”

The Charlottesville art scene was Bollinger’s introduction to the vocation of playing in bands and writing songs. There was a recurring event called Fridays After Five, where local bands would play at the downtown mall, and the Virginia Film Festival would come to town annually. Both of her brothers played music, and her mom is a music therapist with a focus in children’s music. “She always had a children’s choir that sang on her albums, and I was one of the kids in the chorus,” Bollinger beams. This meant kids were at her house rehearsing all the time, and her family’s basement is where her siblings’ bands would practice. “It was a really loud, chaotic house,” she measures, before pausing. “But in a great way! We had so many pets, too. It was very crazy and free and wild in a way that, looking back, I’m really grateful I had.”

Bollinger’s mom’s work with children was a holistic one that was always imprinting on her attention and affection for music, even if she couldn’t feel the influence of it until adulthood. Her mom worked with a community up in the mountains of Wildcat Hollow near Crozet, leading music therapy groups for adults with developmental disabilities, and Bollinger would go to some of the sessions and sit in on workshops. “It wasn’t something I was consciously learning, but I was seeing that music was helping people access different parts of their brain and access memories and comfort in a really nice way,” she says. On new songs like “God Interlude” and “Postcard From a Cloud,” Bollinger settles into the grace of remembering; “Oh, my friends, how’s it going?” she sings. “I think about you more than I’m showing.”

Bollinger’s first single, “Dreams Before,” came out over six years ago. Ask 10 musicians why it took them over half-a-decade to put out their debut album and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. For Bollinger, it was a product of her self-proclaimed lack of patience. “When I was in high school, I would write a song and be so excited about it that I just wanted to release it immediately,” she explains. “I also move on really quickly from what I’m into to the next thing, so I was making these shorter form projects and wanting to release them. It comes from a place of not wanting to wait for the material for a full-length.” What’s refreshing, though, about Bollinger’s arc is that, despite having dozens of singles and a handful of EPs out in the world already, like the very good I Don’t Wanna Lose and the great Look at it in the Light, Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind doesn’t blend into the six years of material she’s already collected—standing alone like a proper debut, which, given that there’s no shortage of Kate Bollinger songs already accessible, is no easy feat.

Leading up to the creation of Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind, Bollinger began collaborating more often. You can hear her on Drugdealer’s “Pictures of You” or Paul Cherry’s “OBO” and “Playroom,” and I even discovered Bollinger’s music for the first time through her inclusion on the Pax song “I’m Not Around.” But as dreamy and memorable as those compositions are, they were never as tectonic as Bollinger’s solo efforts, especially stuff like “Who Am I But Someone” and “No Other Like You.” Even on the EPs she was making back then, which she categorizes as her “feeling around in a dark room, trying to figure out” what she wanted to say, they still sound unequivocally like her. The Drugdealer and Paul Cherry material, good as it all may be, only tells half of the story.

“I definitely found my sound and my songwriting over the course of those years, but I also felt a lack of control with my work,” she says. “When I was recording in high school, and even with ‘Dreams Before’—because I was still writing those songs alone and then bringing them to my friend who was producing—it felt very much like I took an idea from start to finish, that it was a full expression of what I wanted to say. Some of the stuff that I made between now and then feels like I was part of a band. When I was making this album, even though I had somebody produce it, I feel like I took back some control.”

Something I gravitate toward in Bollinger’s work is her voice. It’s feathery and soothing, existing like a balm of sentimentality that reminds me greatly of Michelle Phillips’ singing—a whisper that, on its own, fusses like a lullaby until, once draped in ornate, time-worn textures, becomes something hypnagogic and remarkable. We already know Bollinger’s vocal can flourish in the arena of a duet, paired with masculine voices buffering through the same institutions of rock ‘n’ roll as hers, but Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind quickly offers a clear picture of another truth: She can absolutely wail on her own, though she’s not ready to leave those tandem harmonies behind just yet, which is why Hannah Cohen shows up perfectly on “Postcard From a Cloud” and “I See It Now.” “I feel, in some ways, like a chameleon,” Bollinger says. “There are so many different eras and styles and ways that I like to write and ways that I like to sing that I think I like being able to do both, because one without the other leaves half of me unexpressed.”

To that measure, it makes sense that Bollinger recorded Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind with her friends: Adam Brisbin, Matt White, Jacob Grissom, Eli Crews, Sean Mullins, Cohen and Sam Evian, whose West Shokan, New York studio, Flying Cloud Recordings, was where the record came to life in the summer of 2023 (except for “Running,” which was recorded at Flying Cloud two years earlier). The preciousness of having a tight-knit coterie of players like that isn’t something Bollinger takes for granted. “I think that’s also part of why it took me so long to make this album,” she admits. “I spent a lot of time figuring out who I wanted to work with. When I moved [to Los Angeles], I basically spent the first year doing that, trying out different combinations of people and producers and figuring out what worked. And then, of course, I decided to work with the first person I tried recording with three years ago, which is Sam. When I’m trying on a million outfits, I always wear the first thing that I put on.”

Flying Cloud Recordings has spawned a couple of truly great LPs over the last few years, namely Katie Von Schleicher’s A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night, Palehound’s Eye on the Bat and Evian’s own Plunge, and you can add Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind to the stable. Bollinger says that she felt “a little bit funny” decamping to Upstate New York to record, because she’d just moved to Los Angeles at the time and worried about what returning to the East Coast so quickly might do to her well-being. “But, in retrospect, I’m really glad that I did,” she affirms. “It feels like an East Coast album to me. And, given the feelings of the songs and the fact that I’m making all of my videos with my friends—and even though it was recorded in a nice studio—in many ways it feels homemade. So, I think it made sense to go back to the East Coast. I didn’t want this to be a record where I would clock into a studio everyday. That just felt a little bit too sterile versus how I wanted the record to be.”

Music videos are as crucial to the lifespan of Bollinger’s material as the material itself. When I say that Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind is cinematic, I am not speaking about some indescribable, vibey tone that one might liken to that of a movie. Instead, the idea is that Bollinger’s cinematic inklings is a direct product of the film degree she earned from the University of Virginia, where she graduated from a program that often leaned into experimental practices. “We learned how to shoot 16mm, and we got to shoot with Bolex cameras,” she says. “And then, the rest of the time was spent watching really weird movies my professor liked.” With roots in the abstract, it’s no surprise then that Bollinger rarely ever approaches film or music from a technical perspective.

“I have visuals that come to mind when I’m making music,” she says. “When I was trying to direct my band, or tell them what style I wanted them to play in, I described this whole visual that I was seeing in my head for ‘I See It Now’: There’s a switch-up in the song, and I’m being pushed through swinging saloon doors into a crazy bar full of a bunch of drunk pirates. And they were like, ‘Okay, what does that mean?’ To me, that visual went with what I was hearing in my head. Finally, Matt White, who knows me really well and knows that I think about music in this visual way, was like, ‘I think she means this’—he used some technical music language—and they were like, ‘Oh!’ and did it.” All of that makes sense, as trying to explain the significance of Bollinger’s work to the people around me is like taking apart a collage. These songs are baroque and mystical and jangly and DIY and psychedelic and jazzy. It’s like a teen idol singing Teenage Fanclub at a county fair, or like Mazzy Star singing the jingle for a Heaven Sent perfume commercial.

Bollinger directed the video that accompanied the release of Jessica Pratt’s song “World on a String” in March, and it’s as beautiful as the stills she put together for her own song, “What’s This About (La La La La)” What she’s chasing after in those moments of conducting is usually subconscious, to a point where Bollinger has trouble describing it in retrospect. More often than not, however, it’s a matter of her landing on an image and then building set pieces around it, riffing on aesthetics and colors and textures. The video for “What’s This About” has shots that remind me of some of the shots in Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre, while “Any Day Now” is delivered to us like a window into what happens in a dollhouse when a child looks away. Bollinger brings up “I See It Now” again, this time explaining how the images in her head changed when she revisited the material. “Recently, I’ve been listening to it and I keep seeing a marching band,” she says. True to her word, she took to Instagram this week to post a screencap of that very idea brought to life.

The optical companions to Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind live up to the record’s title, as Bollinger cycles through a multiverse of clips that range from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids-style miniatures, dogs riding in motorcycle sidecars underwater, stop-motion-esque, silent film-inspired kitchen melodrama, suitcases full of onions, cake so colorful it looks like it came from a department store catalogue, a photo of Bobby Sherman with a facsimile signature on it, teen music and gossip magazines, old Panasonic televisions, oddly-shaped lens perspectives and, above all else, the Trip to the Moon-summoning, black-and-white melancholy that is the “Sweet Devil” video in its entirety.

Bollinger’s music has, ever since “Dreams Before” came out, existed like a time capsule. That is not to say her work is retro to a default, because it’s not, but it’s hard to ignore the way she wears her inspirations on her sleeve—refusing to mimic their movements and, instead, reconfiguring them to best fit the context in which she is currently living and creating. Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind is an exercise in curation and intention, as Bollinger never wants to “make something derivative of one thing” that she likes. “But more importantly,” she adds. “I don’t think that I would be able to make that exact thing that I like. Usually, it just turns out like a big mix of my influences. It’s important to me to not just do the same thing as the thing that I love is doing, because the reason I love something is because it’s so singular in the first place.”

In her work, you can hear touches of Françoise Hardy, “Shady Lane”-era Pavement, Broadcast and post-John Cale Velvet Underground. Considering the latter, Bollinger has a real Mo Tucker bent to her singing demeanor, a playfulness worth treasuring. She loves Elephant 6, especially the Apples in Stereo. But, perhaps unbeknownst to the average ear, Bollinger has a real conscious desire to make loud, heavy music that sounds like the punk stuff she spends most her time listening to—a likely surprising take, considering that Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind is gentle Laurel Canyon progeny. When she and White were together many moons ago, he brought this up: “He was like, ‘It seems like you just want to make a record that’s secretly a punk record, but it’s pop music.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I do,’” Bollinger laughs. “ I still don’t feel like I’ve done that.”

But maybe the punk angle isn’t so surprising after all, considering that Bollinger is one of our most gifted modern melody-makers and she has an extensive DIY history. Her attention to melody, however, conjures a long lineage of musicians whose work remains bulletproof when you strip away all the frills. That’s what the best punk songs achieve, and it’s what the best pop songs have long illustrated. Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind is a collision between the two, even though the latter remains more pronounced. And, while some artists are lyricists at heart and some love experimentation, Bollinger pins her passion onto the satisfaction that comes from constructing a song from the ground up. The pursuit of an earworm is part of the magic, and it’s how canons get built. “It’s the most important thing to me in a song,” she says. “Obviously the lyrics are very important, but melody is the most primal part of the song to me. You hear something and you feel something because of the melody. It’s the thing that makes me feel the most when I listen to other music.”

Before moving to Los Angeles, Bollinger found herself traipsing through Virginia and New York, playing gigs with the same group of people over and over. It was communal, allowing her to write, record and release with confidence. “I was close friends with everyone in my band and my producer. I struggled for years after that,” she laments. But upon her departure out west, and the different recording setups and sessions with new collaborations that followed, she came face-to-face with her biggest challenge: “Describing to people, that I haven’t known for years, how I want things to sound,” she says. “In the past, it was just John [Trainum], my producer who I was spending all my time with, and we were listening to all the same music and he just knew what I wanted things to sound like.” As fate would have it then, Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind is a record amplified by its stirring accounts of miscommunication. “Are you the bird floating up there above me, or in my room saying you love me?” she sings at one point, only to pivot a few songs later and shake her fists at a loneliness that always comes to collect: “What will you be when it is gone?”

In an old interview, Bollinger once talked about how her mom always said it was okay to write bad songs. It’s a gracious mantra to live by, to approach your art unafraid of the imperfections it will inevitably bring along with it. “I write a lot of songs that I think are bad—and I don’t really take it to heart,” she says. “I’m just clearing the bad things out so that I can write better things. I think it’s good to just write a song—not in the hopes that it’ll be good, but just for the purpose of expressing something you’re feeling. A lot of the time, for me, those songs aren’t ‘good,’ but they served a purpose.” Bollinger writes rather prolifically, but she rarely returns to a lot of her material—so when she declares that she is the kind of person who “moves on from things quickly,” you take her word for it and meet her halfway.

She tours all the time, too, and her catalog is such a process-heavy collection of music, whether that is the tangible act of making songs or the emotional task of filtering through grief and loss. The fact that—given how fast her intentions shift through a myriad of focuses and how, despite the meaning of her songs always changing—she still feels close to songs like “Running” and “Lonely,” which she wrote more than three years ago, feels especially rare. “I don’t know if it’s a good thing, though,” she interjects about “Running” with a grin, “because it’s about failing relationships.”

Bollinger takes a beat and then pivots. “Some of my way earlier stuff, I was really experimenting on a stylistic level,” she continues. “Those songs feel like me when I tried on an outfit that doesn’t suit me. I was trying to do something. With this record, I feel like I wasn’t really trying to do anything. It was just what came out.” To that end, when a song like “All This Time” comes to a close and Songs From a Thousand Frames of Mind drifts through a finale, Bollinger sings one last tercet and leaves us with a splendid coda: “Imagine the delight in finding you.” It’s a pleasant reminder that most good things are worth the wait.

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.