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On Stage 7/5- Hudson K

hudsonk

Perhaps it was the definitiveness of genre with which she started her musical endeavor which lead Christina Horn, a.k.a. Hudson K, to her current style of genre-dissolving anti-pop piano rock. Listening to her music, you can’t help but guess that the classical masters trained her technical eyes and ears. But when she first heard the early sounds of Tori Amos, it occurred to her that she had options beyond teaching piano lessons and accompanying the church choir. Certainly she has been compared to Amos by music journalists in her native Knoxville, and she won’t deny the strength of Amos’s influence on her ambition. Still, she has poured her own earthiness into her style and created a sound that is uniquely hers. This sound found a home first behind the vocals of fellow Knoxville native Matt Urmy in the short lived but loved local indie outfit Teleskope.

The dissolution of Teleskope in 2005 left Horn wondering if it were possible for her to front a band, rather than just support one. It didn’t hurt that her life, at the time of the Teleskope’s parting, was whirling in the heartache and despair of the increasingly common quarter life crisis: the kind of tragedies of which beautiful music is so often made. She wrote what she knew and brought it where she could, usually to the once smoky bars in downtown Knoxville, or any other corner where she could fit her keyboard. It was during this time that she ran into old friend Laura Bost in a dark garage at a party; the two had become acquainted years earlier, in music school, while both were learning to perfect and perform the classical music they were, years later, eagerly leaving behind. Unlike Horn, Bost was a vocalist by training, and was working as a sound engineer. Like Horn, Bost was feeling the compulsion to write and sing something different than what her classical training as a vocalist had been.

It was a surprisingly easy yet unlikely pairing, with Bost’s endearingly sweet southern pitch offsetting Horn’s airy and often haunting growls. Mutual friend Nate (Barrett), already a well-established local musician with regular spots with Artvandalay, Sarah Schwabe and her Yankee Jazz Band, and other Knoxville regulars, soon added percussion, and, during very special occasions, beautiful harmonies to the act. Their first album, Safety Line, was independently released in July 2007, launching a series of performances over the following summer in Knoxville and surrounding southern cities that couldn’t quite be called a tour.

The first live and print reviews were kind to the group’s first effort. But by the fall of 2007, the band had evolved into something distinctly more professional than the talented but naïve trio who had recorded that first album. Horn, Bost, and Barrett were all developing individually, but they were doing so in a way that only brought the band to a smarter and more expressive cohesion. If their sounds of late on the local scene are any indication of what’s to come, Knoxville had better stay tuned: Hudson K may just be pioneering of the emergence of a sound and a scene that this southern city will soon be proud to claim as it’s own original creation.

June 29th, 2009 | Category: | Leave a comment

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