Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how your childhood impacted your musical direction?
A: Sure! I had a very musical family that encouraged me to try anything and everything I was interested in. Their encouragement was essential to developing the love, skills, and tenacity needed to forge a pathway in the independent music world.
Q: How are you planning on growing your fan base and sharing your music with the world? What message do you have for anyone who is about to discover “Carolyn Kendrick”?
A: I’m hoping to play as many shows as possible in 2025, and collaborate with some new and fun musicians, as well as old friends. My message for anyone just learning about my music is: hello and welcome, thank you for being here!
Q: Who is the most inspiring artist for you right now? And where do you find inspiration for making music?
A: I always come back to Aoife O’Donovan, Anais Mitchell, Kaia Kater, and Maya De Vitry. They are continually making and releasing incredible songs with a lot of heart.
Q: Can you tell us about the story or message behind the album, “Each Machine.”?
A: In 2023, to everyone’s surprise, I poured every ounce of my life into learning about Satan. (I know, a strange decision – bear with me.) It was a big thematic left-turn for me, a secular musician best known for writing love songs and playing the fiddle. However, during the pandemic, when my touring and performing life ground to a standstill, I began supplementing my music career with journalistic work as a docu-series producer, researcher, and writer, which is what eventually led me to this Satanic subject matter.
As an extension of this new journalism side-work, I said yes to helping research a project about Satan. It wasn’t my project; I was a hired gun, a helping hand. Throughout this side quest I interviewed Satanists, theologians, evangelists, journalists, witches, warlocks, cult survivors, teenagers falsely accused of devil worship, indigenous scholars, reactionary right-wing politicians, and more. I read sizeable amounts of literature on the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the medieval blood libel panic, the origins of Satan in the New Testament, and the Puritan early colonial contexts for the Salem Witch Trials. Over time, it became clear that these moral panics are all the same human primal fear instinct expressed in different fonts, to devastating ends. Same ideas; different cultures and different centuries. Learning about our past panics was a heartbreakingly effective way to grasp our current panic-laden landscape, but the more I learned, the more my confidence of perspective faltered. Again and again, throughout these historical phenomena (as well as in the post-Covid Trumpian flurry of misinformation) I watched people who consider themselves good and upright moral arbiters of truth cause considerable harm, often to those they claimed to love most, and most often in the name of good. It led me to wonder: what harm have I accidentally caused in the name of my own “good”?
In 2024, my side quest work ended, and I no longer spent my waking hours googling things like “how to pronounce Nebuchadnezzar.” Life was back to normal, and I returned to my touring and gigging life as a musician, but I certainly didn’t feel back to normal. The profundity of the subject matter had drastically shifted my worldview. It was as if I had just come back from Oz, and everything was just as I had left it, but no one understood why I had a little wild in my eye — or why I kept launching into recitations of cold, hard Satanic facts. To my surprise, I realized I had unwittingly made a bit of a covert Faustian bargain of my own: the gift of political and historical context, in exchange for my shaky sanity and ethical confidence. What to do, what to do? I wondered. I decided to make some art about it.
To commemorate and process my year with the Devil, I did what felt natural: I called up one of my best friends and collaborators, Isa Burke, and we decided to record an album of traditional and original folk songs that felt energetically connected to the subject matter I had been researching. These recordings would eventually come to be the album Each Machine, which will be released on December 6th, 2024. After recording the music, I decided to write about the experiences, interviews, and characters that inspired the music and propelled me through my devilish year. That writing became a series of essays that will be published as a zine in December, alongside the Each Machine vinyl LP release. I’ll share some sneak previews of this writing in this very newsletter throughout the fall.
Sonically, this is some of my favorite music I’ve ever made. Though the subject matter of good-and-evil is certainly weighty, the music is fun. We had the time of our lives mixing and matching very old (and some very new original!) folk songs with a huge array of instruments. There are vibey electric guitars, Venezuelan cuatros, pump organs, chimes, timpani, vibraphones, accordions, out-there modular synths, and of course some old-time fiddle-and-acoustic guitar numbers for you trad-lovers out there.
Within both the recorded music and the accompanying zine, Each Machine is my effort to reflect on my year learning about the Devil, and therefore inventory my personal north. When I check my compass, I’d like to know if I’m going in the wrong direction and know when to move against the wind.
Q: How would you describe your sound in one word for potential listeners?
A: Immersive
Q: Did you face any challenges while writing or recording “Each Machine”?
A: Certainly! Being an independent musician is challenging because you have to wear many hats out of necessity. Balancing making the record while simultaneously building out the infrastructure to release it through my label, High Occulture, was a logistical challenge. The music itself is always the easiest part – it’s the business side that can get complex.
Q: What is the message of your music? And what are your goals as an artist?
A: I hope the message of my music is to lean into collectivism and progress. I hope my music encourages people to live in pursuit of love, community, and justice, which intrinsically involves creating systems of accountability for ourselves and others.
Q: Who is your dream artist to collaborate with? (dead or alive)
A: Ooooh…. either Bill Frisell, or Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman.
Q: What is your advice for people interested in pursuing music as a career or for those trying to enter the industry?
A: Be prepared to play the long game. There is a lot of self-investment that happens on the front end. There are a million ways to be a professional musician and since the industry is in constant chaotic flux, approach your career with a creative mindset. The industry exists for its own sake and is not expressly designed with artist wellbeing at the center. Get involved with other musicians as emotional and technical support early on, and join your local musician union or UMAW.
Q: If you could go back in time and give a younger you some words of wisdom, what would they be?
A: Keep joy at the center of all you do and you’ll be fine.
