Love Menu, Tuesday April 15

[April 9th, 2008]

[ACOUSTIC ENSEMBLE] It’s just past 10 am, and Emily Katz walks into Albina Press looking a little disheveled. “I’m trying to wake up earlier,” she says. “But luckily I don’t always have to.” In a city where most artists support their creativity with a service job, Katz is a self-sufficient rarity.

For the past few years, she’s run her own organic-and-sustainable clothing line, first under the moniker Bonnie Heart Clyde and recently under her own name. And though her design life is flourishing, with recent shows in Las Vegas and Seattle, it’s the possibilities that life creates for her first love—music—that’s got the 25-year-old singer-songwriter so excited. “The thing that’s been really great about doing the music and traveling with it,” she explains, “is that I can do my clothing sales at the same time.”

Katz—named after Simon & Garfunkel’s “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her”—fronts local folk ensemble Love Menu, a group built around her lyrical songwriting and stunningly rich voice. Playing both finger-picked guitar and an old, 12-chord autoharp, Katz produces delicate compositions that recall Cat Power before she became a Chanel model. When she sings of a tumultuous relationship or chance encounter, you can feel the weight in her voice.

Though she’s performed around town for a few years and began writing and recording songs as a Portland high-schooler, Katz just recently began playing with a band—and what a difference a few friends can make. “They’re all really great musicians,” Katz says of Love Menu bandmates Bobby Smith (guitar/glockenspiel), Stephen Kierniesky (banjo/guitar), Emily Baker (drums) and Jeevan Singh (backing vocals). “And I’m like, ‘I can play the autoharp!’’’

Modesty aside, Katz’s music reeks of confidence—a notion confirmed when she mentions “waking up the other day with a complete song coming out.” And though her warm songs seem almost effortless, they’re no doubt enlivened by the subtle and stately instrumentation Love Menu brings to each track; the band just finished an eight-song debut EP, recorded live in one weekend at K Records founder Calvin Johnson’s infamous Dub Narcotic studio.

Set to take off on Love Menu’s first full-band regional tour, Katz feels confident her two artistic endeavors can coexist: “At the end of the day, even though the music isn’t really making any kind of money, it’s feeding all the other parts,” she says coyly. “I just want to get it out there into the world.”