Kaki King

Hailed by Rolling Stone as “a genre unto herself,” Kaki King is a true iconoclast, a visionary musician/artist whose singular work stands out amongst the easily formatted. Over her decade-long career, the Brooklyn-based guitarist/composer has recorded five diverse and distinctive LPs, performed with such icons as Foo Fighters, Timbaland, and Mountain Goats, contributed to a variety of film and TV soundtracks (spanning Golden Globe-nominated work on Sean Penn’s Into The Wild to scoring – and appearing in as guitar-playing hand double – the acclaimed 2007 drama, August Rush), and played to ever-growing audiences on innumerable world tours. Each twist and veer turned the page, another step forward on a truly exceptional musical path. Beginning with 2002’s Everybody Loves You – to date, her only fully acoustic guitar recording – King has expanded and reconceived the role of the solo instrumental artist, constantly kicking at the boundaries of what’s expected.

"Glow," her groundbreaking new Velour Music Group release, is both indescribable and definitive, an evocative, exuberant collection of genre agnostic soundscapes, rich with wit, theme, and inspired invention.

“This is a guitar record,” she says. “This is the sound of a person playing guitar. Whatever additions we made, the fundamental of this record is still one person playing a guitar. That’s who I am.”

Glow marks an artistic reboot for King, whose most recent recordings integrated traditional songcraft, additional musicians, and her own vocal stylings, all in pursuit of her individualistic sonic vision. Though critically acclaimed, the release of 2010’s band-oriented Junior was followed by a self-described “existential crisis.” Thrown by the unplanned directions her life and music had taken, King was suddenly hesitant of the way forward. Always a resolutely freethinking musician, a new and vast range of possibilities seems to have opened up for the ever-evolving, always unconventional King.