Singer - Songwriter Kirsten Proffit is a Lone Ranger
Kirsten
Proffit’s vocals are hauntingly beautiful on the song she wrote, “Break Your
Heart,” a song yet to be released, but it can be heard on her reverbnation
website. Her friend, sometimes co-writer Steve Berns plays a Brian Setzer
signature Gretsch guitar and Proffit accompanies herself with a Gretsch
Electromatic guitar. Her voice is rich and emotive. The vibe is Americana and
earthy. Throughout her career Proffit has demonstrated that she is a versatile
artist whose songwriting palette and vocals have many colors. “Wanderlust,” from
her My Devotion album released in
2012, features Kirsten Proffit playing a Guild acoustic guitar and the lyrics
flow like a well written poem, as her vocals are subtle and pretty, matching the
stripped down instrumentals. “Wanderlust
is introduced by Mark Christian’s electric guitar which emulates the sound of a
theremin, although that was not by intent.
“Mark Christian does this really neat thing on his
Telecaster where he does volume swells, while playing the slide and it sounds
like a theremin. We also overlapped a couple of the tracks, so you can’t make
out exactly what is going on,” says Kirsten Proffit.
The easy flowing “California,” also from the new album
features the singer-songwriter playing her Guild guitar, while Mark Christian
plays the dobro giving the song a Roots like vibe contrasted with a light Pop
influenced vocal. The harmonica is used sparingly and to great effect for a song
that is mellow and reflective.
“I wrote the song “California,” when I moved away. You
wake up every morning when you have moved from a place that you love and that
you had a bittersweet relationship with and you ask, where am I and you have to
talk yourself down off the ledge. Oh wait, I’m here and this is where I belong
right now. I had to talk myself through it sometimes, because I was gone and I
missed my home. I felt like I was in a good place, because it was a beautiful
place and it was healthy for me to be there. It was love – hate, push and pull.
At the same time, I had to get away and there were moments when it was so
beautiful to be away and I was happy. The song is sort of a love song for
California. It was more of a breakup love song for California and everything
that it meant to me at the time. It represented a lot of hurt,” she explains (Kirsten
Proffit moved back to California in 2011).
In
the very competitive market of having songs placed in television shows and in
films, Kirsten Proffit has done exceptionally well. Just a small sampling of
where her songs have appeared, includes
Friday Night Lights, Dawson’s Creek,
Smallville, over 1,000 times her
music has been used on the Tonight Show
with Jay Leno and her songs appear on the DVD soundtracks for
Felicity and
Party of Five. Martin Short selected
three of her songs for his feature film
Jiminy Glick in Lalawood.
We spoke to Kirsten Proffit the night after she
performed as one of the three members of the all-girl group Calico The Band,
also comprised of two incredibly gifted singers – songwriters Manda Mosher and
Jaime Wyatt, all of whom hail from Los Angeles.
“It was our first show with Calico The Band and it was
just more than I thought it would be. The first time of anything is always a
little awkward, but it was just wonderful.
The girls are just such good musicians and their personalities on stage
are…everybody pulled their weight plus. It was really, really fun. You don’t
always get that in a first performance, you are always still trying to find your
way around and we didn’t have that. It was really super fun. I think everybody
liked it,” she says.
Upon her return to California, Proffit who punctuates
her conversation with superlatives says, “I started getting really interested in
all of these different females that I saw around town. I really liked Manda and
I went to a couple of her shows. I just watched her, followed her around and I
thought she was really good. She is really honest with the delivery of her music
and everything. I really liked her and she was playing with a lot of people that
I knew (then with tongue firmly planted
in cheek she says) maybe she thought I was a stalker (she laughs).”
Kirsten Proffit already knew Jaime Wyatt as she had
invited Wyatt to join the band she put together in October of 2011.
“Jaime and I bonded and formed a friendship. I just have
so much respect for her. She is this beautiful artist, this beautiful person and
a lovely human being in every way,” she says.
Kirsten Proffit an Orange County Music Award winner and
who has been nominated numerous times for other Orange County Music Awards and
Manda Mosher who has been the recipient of twenty-two Los Angeles Music Awards,
landed on the same gig at the House of Blues in Los Angeles one evening. They
performed one song together, Lucinda Williams’ “Change The Locks,” and the
audience response was so phenomenal that it planted a seed in their minds about
future endeavors together.
Kirsten Proffit recalls that night, “As we were breaking
down our gear, she (Manda Mosher) said to me, ‘I have been watching your career
and everything and I am glad I met you. You are sort of a lone ranger like me.’
I thought that is an interesting way to look at it, because neither of us are
part of any cliques in town. We are both independent and we do our own thing. We
forge ahead. I don’t get locked in with (cliques). I feel if you are part of a
clique you are never going to be any better than the clique. I try to keep my
head above the water and stay above the fray.”
She mentioned the lone ranger thing and I went home and
thought about it and I came up with a song idea with a really pretty melody and
beautiful chorus. The song goes, “It’s
true that I’m guilty of going it alone / These boots are wearing heavy as I’m
longing for home / The stars on the horizon are calling me again / I stand
accused, I’m a lone ranger just like you.” That’s the way the chorus goes. I
wrote a verse and one chorus and I called the girls… no I facebooked messaged
them both together so they could see the thread. I said okay guys you don’t know
each other, but we have all heard of each other and we have all kind of crossed
paths. I have this idea for a song called “Lone Ranger,” because of what Manda
said. How about we all get together and we write it and record it. We did and it
was so easy to do. It practically wrote itself. The girls came up with some
beautiful verses. I got so excited about it and I thought I could do this every
day. This is just fun. We recorded it and I was thinking, why don’t we start a
side project, but I didn’t want to be the big mouth to begin it and to push
somebody. They just took it upon themselves (she starts to laugh). I was so
happy that they wanted to do it just as badly as I did. The songs just started
flowing and it has been easy to write these really strong songs.”
Recently, Calico The Band recorded the “Lone Ranger,” and the song sends a
strong signal as to how good this band is going to be.
“We are all sort of lone rangers in a way and we all
have been out there doing our thing. When we compare stories they are so similar
in the way that we have approached the business. It is funny, because we all
have different strengths. All of us have put our feet into the water in
different areas of the music biz. When we combine our accomplishments, our
knowledge and our connections, it is pretty amazing. It is pretty cool.
We are doing a version of "I am Just A Poor Wayfaring
Stranger.” It is a public domain Folk song (editor’s
note: thought to originate in the early 19th century), but we
wrote our own version of it. It is very much an
O Brother Where Art Thou kind of a
slow moving, trudging along, syrupy, swampy, really cool harmonies song and
everybody sings a verse. It is a tale of woe and looking for the end of life on
earth and hoping to get to heaven sort of thing. It is fun and I am having a
blast.
The music (of Calico The Band) is really interesting,
because we have these three-part vocal harmonies going on. We also have a lot of
different instrumentation for each song. Manda plays the dobro on a couple of
songs, I will play the mandolin, we will tie a tambourine to our feet and stuff
like that (she laughs) to help keep the rhythm. We all play the guitar, so there
is a lot of interesting stuff happening and I think everybody likes the flow,”
she says.
We wondered if a band led by women and completely
comprised of women empowers and motivates other women. “I totally think so. It
is so cool, because women love it and women support it. It is exciting for
women. The girl peer group that I have has come out in droves in support of what
we are doing. Our manager, who is a woman, is so excited about what we are
doing. (She encourages us) You can book our own gigs, you don’t need a guy to
run your sound and you know what the heck you are doing with your careers. It is
extremely empowering. Anytime a woman steps up and says, ‘I’m going to do this
and I am doing it great,’ and regardless of if I am a female or a male, I am
going to be the best that I can be, I think that it is definitely empowering to
women.”
Calico The Band will not supplant the solo careers of
Kirsten Proffit, Manda Mosher and Jaime Wyatt. “I love playing with these girls
and I am definitely always going to write. I am going to write forever and there
is no reason to not be involved in the creation of studio productions. I love
producing other bands and I love working with other girl songwriters and helping
them to make something great for themselves and this is just another step on the
road. I am just going to explore it for all that it is worth.
I think that it has a lot of potential and I will ride it out as long as
we can ride it,” she says.
Kirsten Proffit was born in Santa Cruz California, the
oldest of three children. “We (her family) had instruments everywhere and we
were central coastal Californians. If you can imagine what that means, it is
very laid back, very artistic and it can be a somewhat flakey existence. My
brother and sister are both very musical. They are really beautiful people. We
traveled and we had a house in southern California in Fullerton and we had
family in Santa Cruz, so we were kind of back and forth during most of my
childhood. We traveled overseas somewhat. My dad had a side business (she
laughs). He had a little contraband sort of thing going on with some connections
in Spain. I think my parents just liked to travel. They had a boat that they
lived on and we would go with them and we would soak up the culture. There was a
lot of darkness to the period, because it wasn’t a happy life. Looking back at
it now, it was oh that was kind of interesting. This was when I was up to about
age ten. We always lived in
California, but we traveled to Spain and we just lived there for months at a
time.
We always had instruments out and we just played
whatever when we were kids. Do you know how when that is just how your life is
and you do not realize that it is any different than anyone else’s life? There
we were and there were instruments everywhere. I remember being four years old
and there was an autoharp and I learned how to play “Three Blind Mice,” on it.
My mom played guitar, saxophone and piano. There was lots of music in my life
all of the time and it was a really important thing. I know that a lot of people
say that, but it was the only thing that I had for a long time and it made me
feel connected to the world. That is how I learned how to sing. My mom really
loved Joni Mitchell and she had all of the Joni Mitchell records. I would just
sit and listen and listen and listen. I would sing along and I would try to make
my voice do the things that she (Joni Mitchell) could do with her voice. I
cannot remember (a time) when I wasn’t consumed with music, and always pursuing
anything that I could learn about it. I have always been impressed with amazing
musicians and I love to learn from them. Still today I love singing with people
who are good and just trying to soak up anything that I can from them.
Although Kirsten Proffit has written songs, while seated
at her piano, she prefers to write using her guitar and she considers it to be
the first serious instrument that she took up. “The guitar really spoke to me
and you can play all of these rhythms with it. I just like the sound and the
earthiness of it. I love really, solid, beautiful melodies along with rhythms.
I didn’t really get serious about the guitar until I was about twenty-one
or twenty-two. It goes back to what I was saying earlier, when you are doing
something all of the time, you don’t really think it is different than anybody
else, because it is your natural thing to do. I didn’t think that I had anything
special, but I do now. I appreciate my gifts and I am thankful for them. I try
to develop them all of the time and I try to make my craft better.
I strive, but at the time I didn’t realize that everybody isn’t like me.
I never really had dreams of grandeur. I just thought this is what we all
do, we all play instruments.”
Kirsten Proffit’s first album was self-titled and
originally recorded on two inch tape at Grandmaster Recorders studio on North
Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. The album was to be released on a small label
however, the label folded before the CD came out. Proffit released it herself in
2003.
She recalls, “By then I had met a bunch of people and I
had been playing a few shows and things like that and getting my feet wet. One
of my friends took me to a manager. He was a big wig and one of the typical (expletive)
managers (she laughs) that you meet
in Hollywood. He was like I can do this. I can get her a record deal, blah blah
blah. We took my demos and we shopped and shopped and shopped and we couldn’t
make anything happen. I spent about a year goofing around with him, until I
realized that I felt so badly about myself, because I am a dark haired brunette
and I look more like the girl next door than a sultry blond.
My manager would bring me these photos of these blond
bombshell types and say this is our competition and I would say I didn’t realize
it is a beauty contest or otherwise I would have taken some different steps
here. I thought that I was supposed
to be writing a song, so pretty much I quit him. I floated around and I
entertained ideas from different management companies and different labels and
things like that. Finally I met a really good songwriter and producer with a
wonderful studio. He is a very well kept secret in Hollywood. His name is Bruce
Witkin. He is a good friend of mine and we are kindred souls. We decided to make
Lucky Girl together (her
second record). Then Broken Arrow Records (Ani
DiFranco, Jonatha Brooke, Charlie Hunter Quartet), an indie label with
really good distribution picked it up. I had a great time working with Bruce and
he is the kind of producer who produces the music for the song. It was so fun to
be involved and I learned so much from him. He never told me what to do, he
always cared about my opinion and he always made my opinion very important in
the room. I learned to be bold and I learned to say what I thought the song
needed boldly and with confidence.”
Lucky Girl
has some very poignant songs such as “Marilyn,” a song about not being lonely
anymore and finding love. Some songs on
the album are drawn from events and people in Kirsten Proffit’s life, such as
the song “Kissing Love Goodbye.”
I wrote “Kissing Love Goodbye,” because I had a
girlfriend who was in a terrible relationship and she would not leave. I was
counseling her (while she was in this) dangerous relationship. She kept telling
me that she loved him and I said you need to love yourself. I said this guy
promised you everything and he is not following through on his promises. I wrote
“Kissing Love Goodbye,” with that inspiration. I guess when you talk to somebody
over and over again about the same thing it eventually has to become a song. It
becomes programming. I eventually ended up sneaking my friend away in the middle
of the night and putting her on a plane to Indiana to be with her family,” she
says.
Then there are songs like “Girlfriend Potential,” also
from the Lucky Girl album. “I wrote
that song and I had the chorus in my mind, because this man who shall remain
nameless, whom I could not stand working with, this producer, was so crude and
every single time that I would come to the studio, he would tell me about all of
his female conquests. He was such a pig and then he would say it like this, oh
yes, I was with blah blah blah girl this week, but she’s not girlfriend
potential and I would say (her voice
becomes sarcastic) oh she is beneath you. Then I was in the studio with a
friend of mine named Rick Neigher who is a very cool producer (editor’s
note: as well as sound engineer and songwriter).
He was one of the first guys to work
with Alanis Morissette (has also worked
with Melanie Doane, Tommy Emmanuel, John Mellencamp, The Go-Go’s, Sass Jordan).
We were sitting together, laughing about the story and we wrote the song
together, based upon our conversation about the other producer,” she recalls.
Michael Woodrum produced the current album
My Devotion and longtime friend
Kirsten Proffit and multi-instrumentalist (guitar, dobro, banjo, mandolin) Mark
Christian was asked to join them in the studio. The album became a tribute to
Kirsten Proffit’s grandfather with whom she was very close. The cover of the
album has a photo of him and the flight crew of the World War II B-17 aircraft,
My Devotion, for which he was the tail gunner. One of the songs on the album
“Flood and Fire,” is based on a conversation that she had with her grandfather.
“He was like a father to me and he is a hero in my life.
He and I had this conversation about what happens after you go from this life.
He would say here Kirsten, sit down and have some coffee with me. We would sit
down and we would talk about the afterlife together. He has passed on now and he
died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was an amazing man. I wanted to write that song
and I wanted to use all of the roots instruments. I always knew how much he
loved that and how he loved the banjo. He loved music so much. He loved all
sorts of instruments. I figured this record is going to be for him. I ended up
forming that whole idea around him and we did all of that artwork. All of the
pictures on the back are all of my family. They are my grandpa’s sisters and
brothers, in their uniforms, with their wives. The picture on the actual CD is
of him leaning on the tail gun of his airplane,” she says.
Please
visit the website for Kirsten Proffit and the website for
Calico The Band.
This interview is dedicated to the memory of
Maurice Carlson, the grandfather of Kirsten Proffit
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