Hook & Anchor

Hook & Anchor is a story of lost songs finding a home. After a busy five years of touring with Portland-based band Blind Pilot, Kati Claborn was sitting on a steadily growing pile of tunes. As chance would have it, longtime friend and collaborator Erik Clampitt was looking for material and musicians to play a handful of gigs, culminating in a show at the San Francisco Bluegrass & Old-Time Festival. Songs were dusted off, friends were gathered, and the music that emerged had a voice and cohesion that immediately resonated with audiences and demanded to be more than a mere one-off. The project quickly became a vessel for other member's back-pocket tunes, giving the music breadth and variety. The band consists of Claborn (banjo, guitar), Clampitt (electric guitar, pedal steel), old-time music veteran Gabrielle Macrae (fiddle, banjo, guitar), and fellow Blind Piloters Luke Ydstie (bass, piano) and Ryan Dobrowski (drums).

The band's self-titled debut, to be released July 22, 2014, via Jealous Butcher and Woodphone Records, is adventurous yet accessible, stitched together by a reverence for the evolution of traditional American music and the strong individual voices that comprise the band. Although generalizations don't come easy, the album exists somewhere at the confluence of country, folk, and rock and roll, with every track pushing definitions across a new border. First barreling along like the dark pony of the string-band apocalypse, the music veers off into sweet pastures of country rock before stealing your breath with a haunting ballad. Each step along the way is imbued with a raw, direct immediacy that is easy to fall into and hard to forget. Recorded primarily in a live setting with Type Foundry's Adam Selzer at the helm, the album captures the energy and excitement of the shows that pulled the band into being. Hook & Anchor