Very early into “Consistency”, the short introductory track on Katie Pederson’s new album LOOSE ENDS, Pederson sings “…I’ve pondered if youth and freedom hold the key to contentedness and joy”. It is a singular and plaintive moment that opens an album full of more exuberance than one would expect based on the opening track. And it is part of the mystery that makes Ms. Pederson such an interesting songwriter. No, it is not a new gimmick – to frame an otherwise enthusiastic sounding pop record with wistful melancholy. But Ms. Pederson is comfortable enough in her young self to allow her still maturing and even younger self to pull her through the memories of what made her. As she explores her not-too-distant past, LOOSE ENDS unfolds like a collage from that past, and Ms. Pederson reflects on it as if it were comprised of Instagrams from her life. There is a significant amount of looking back on this record, and at very specific times and places. LOOSE ENDS is where Katie Pederson has been and what has brought her to this moment. It is at once a response to, and a shaking off of, the ghosts of her HAPPIMESS EP.
LOOSE ENDS is an album that can be judged as much by its music as by its confessional lyrics. Ms. Pederson handles upper tempos and ballads with equal amounts of care and skill. Her arrangements are cognizant of time but not bound by them, and there are some very intriguing twists and turns in her transitions. And
while it would be easy to box her in with her contemporaries, her piano and vocal styles are as reminiscent of a young Elton John as they are a present day Sara Bareilles. She is backed expertly throughout the record by bass and drums, and augmented by trumpet and strings. But the songs, if they had to, could stand naked. They are that good. She says that writing songs is like transcribing “a diary…I can get it out and I don’t have to carry it around anymore.” She gets as giddy about writing a sad song as she does a happy one, saying “it’s this weird juxtaposition of feelings where I am so sad and then I write this song and its good and I want to share it…”
Recurrent themes of wanderlust, the search for an identity, and the re-capture of youth permeate the album to the point of conceptualism, but never once does Ms. Pederson revert to navel-gazing. The songs are compact and taut, crisply recorded and the entire production has a bounce to it that you don’t notice until you too are bouncing. Ms. Pederson, who wrote the music and lyrics, has a knack for pairing contemplative words with arrangements that she paints in shorter strokes, thus creating songs that sound crafted instead of labored. These contrasts are a catalyst to active listening - and your experience is enriched if you pay attention to the songs as the sum of their parts. On “Wildwood”, Ms. Pederson has mounted a metaphorical Schwinn and is pedaling easily through her old Ann Arbor neighborhood. She misses it, but her longing is not expressed as bitterness or resentment. Instead, she begins her reveal of that Instagram collage at a ten-speed’s pace. She sets up the establishing shot in her movie, and then begins to introduce her character. “Who I Want To Be” is the centerpiece of a five-song cycle that opens the record. Although Ms. Pederson says the conjoined narrative was unintentional, there is so much of the album’s first twenty minutes that reveal her motivations, her experiences, and her trip from twenty-two year old Katie to the present day twenty-five year old Ms. Pederson. As those experiences unfurl, she semi-regularly returns to familiar comfort zones to compose herself in the midst of growing chaos. These are the things, we learn, that make “Katie” who she wants to be. On “Different Couches”, Ms. Pederson allows that during her journey to here, she “lost who it was I was trying to become but I am dying to be free.”
“I wonder what the future holds”, says Pederson. “Youth has a way of keeping you naïve and curious. But the experiences I went through made me grow up a little bit.” She is reflecting on the LOOSE ENDS songs, most of were written between 2 and 3 years ago. LOOSE ENDS is actually the second pass at most of those songs. The first attempt was marred by questionable engineering and corrupted files. This time, Ms. Pederson put herself in the trust of a small team of hand-picked engineers, producers, and musicians that skillfully avoided cloying studio trickery or nods to pop-music contrivance, but also helped re-energize a clutch of songs whose relevance was beginning to fade. “It’s been cool to listen back to these songs and recognize that it’s in the past.”
When she is asked about the point at which the past meets the present, she checks the very last song on the record. “I Will Sing”, she says represents the conclusion she came to when her coming-of-age journey ended. A mentor told her “whatever you do you have to keep singing…it’s who you are.” Within the song, “Katie” becomes Ms. Pederson. “One of these days I’ll break free from the cage/Blow all the cast iron off and away.” It is in these final moments of LOOSE ENDS that Ms. Pederson begins also to lay the groundwork for what is to come. As the punchier first half of the album gives way to the more ballad-ish second half, Ms. Pederson’s bike ride is coming to an incline, slowing down the pace of the record and bringing her reflective tendencies to the fore. The songs are still strong, and maybe one more up-tempo number near the end would have been a bonus, but also may have interrupted the natural flow of the record and its accidental narrative.
Asked whether the pondering she sings about in “Consistency” has paid off, Ms. Pederson says “it has…and it hasn’t. As you get older more questions pop up and they get harder.”
Sounds like it’s time for another bike ride.
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