Belmont transfer student Kim Logan and her husky, opera-trained voice brought a spark to the Curb Event Center crowd as she glided across the stage during the Rock Showcase.
“[Logan] was very electrifying, the band can really rock,” said Erin Berry, who was near the front of the Curb Event Center during the showcase earlier in November. “[The Rock Showcase] definitely saved the best for last.”
After spending time at Berklee College of Music, the self-proclaimed love child of Bonnie Raitt and Jack White has found a niche in Nashville that welcomes her mix of old rock ‘n’ roll and country.
Growing up singing opera was the key influence for Logan’s artwork, and the place where her “theatricality and darkness comes out.”
“I think [to have complete and total artwork] is sort of a lost ideal and a lost goal to take all of the finest pieces of all the methods of art that you can create as a human and unite them into one experience,” Logan said. “That’s truly what I always wanted to do.”
Her journey to Belmont, one that took her through the Berklee in Boston, was made through the style of music she wanted to play. Logan’s describes her music as a mix of old rock ‘n’ roll and country, a sound she tries to “mix it all together into something new.”
“The music [at Berklee] wasn’t really conducive to the music I play,” Logan said.
When Logan moved from Boston to Nashville, she still needed to find a band to play with her. She met her guitar player Matthew Paige in an alley between honky tonks and the Ryman Auditorium in lower Broadway two years ago. Paige later introduced Logan to Gaelen Mitchell, who plays the drums and percussion, and Ronald Marsh, who plays the bass and mandolin.
“We’re all best friends and we live next door to each other,” Logan said. “You always hear the fairy tale of the Rolling Stones, that sort of thing being best friends with who you work with, but it’s real and its true and it can happen. So these boys are the perfect match for what I want to do and they are just so talented in what I want.”
Logan and her band played for East Nashville Underground Festival, this summer where she developed a relationship with East Nashville. The East Nashville Underground Festival was her first big show with “the boys.”
“Being an East Nashvillian you really start to see where the real crux of the music industry that isn’t Music Row lives,” Logan said. “The real underground indie is really original material, artists come in droves out of the east side and East Nashville Underground is just this awesome festival that showcases that.”
Logan said the community is a circle of family-like friends to her.
“Everyone supports each other and it’s a community,” Logan said. “East Nashville is unlike any place I have lived. We are very lucky for having the friends that we have in [the] east side.”
In addition to several shows and festivals, Logan’s work was also featured on a Chicago radio station without her knowledge.
“We didn’t even know about [the radio play] until somebody to came to me on Facebook that there was this really cool and eclectic DJ in Chicago that came across our EP that we put out before the record,” Logan said. “It was just the coolest surprise.”
On Halloween, Logan released her first recorded album. Mike Esser mixed and mastered the album Logan said Esser truly understood what she wanted in the album. The album is featured on Bandcamp and at Grimey’s Used and Pre-loved Records on Eighth Avenue.
While recording their album, Logan said Mitchell decided he wanted to make the last track on their record, “Keep You Love,” sound like she was in a grave yard. Mitchell took his entire bag of “ percussive paraphernalia” and proceeded to drop them repeatedly.
“It ended up being this chain-gang jail beat, that was just so creepy and haunting,” Logan said. “It really made that recording. It was very creative on his part.”
Logan said she has half of another record already written and wants to get back in the studio soon.
“Basically the idea is to keep working,” Logan said. “I don’t know how to do anything else, besides to stay busy.”