Kropf finds a soft Nashville touch on ‘Lights’
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
While working on the follow-up to 2014’s “Chrysalis,” singer-songwriter-pianist Heather Kropf had a revelation.
“I felt this collection of songs was beyond my ability,” she says.
The writing she could handle, as she’s proven many times over the last 20 years. What she was looking for was someone to help flesh them out, and she landed on the idea of Nashville producer Lex Price.
“I've been a huge fan of Mindy Smith,” she says, “and was introduced to her first on the album ‘Long Island Shores,’ which Lex Price produced. I still love that record. And then I found out that he works as k.d. lang's bassist and I knew that meant he would have a really solid grasp of material that slips in-between genres.”
So, she emailed him, and while he doesn’t normally work with artists he doesn’t know, he agreed to take on the project that has resulted in the new album “Lights.” It’s another beauty from the honey-voiced Kropf, who brings to mind Suzanne Vega and Rickie Lee Jones.
The album’s soft, meditative tone reflects some upheaval that the artist has experienced in recent years.
“I've gone through some enormous lifechanges — dissolution of a longtime relationship, sold my home, left my job — but those things were really the result of kind of waking up to a part of myself that I had forgotten about. I realized I needed to shed aspects of myself that were no longer true. So the songs are about how you navigate personal transformation, which is kind of metaphysical stuff. It's like trying to squeeze Ram Dass into thebox of pop song or something.”
In one of the standouts, “Ghost Town,” she puts her loss into a larger framework of the world tearing itself apart and a town that’s now just “timber bones and brick for skin.” One of the most haunting tracks is the lush piano ballad “Winter Sun,” that arrives on a chorus of “In the distance/ lights are Kennywood.”
“Myfriend had a series of photos posted on his Facebook feed from his walks in a cemetery on a hill above the city,” she says. “One day he posted a photo looking out over the cemetery and to the evening sky with the city skylinein the distance. The valley was faintly lit up. This picture had a caption: ‘Lights are Kennywood.’ It was a magical photo. I thought the caption was so poetic that I commented that I wanted to turn that into a song. Months later I woke up at 5:30 in the morning withthe entire song in my head.”
It’s dedicated to “Will,” who was a student in a tutoring program she ran out of the East Liberty Presbyterian Church who died in a McKeesport house fire.
“All the threads of my life were unraveling simultaneous to this other story and they all get woven together, the idea that innocence and happiness and beauty are everywhere. They dwell or coexist with all the otherstuff. We just have to recognize it.”
The music on the album flows so smoothly and naturally, she says, because “the attitude and vibe in the room was so mellow and intuitive, positive. Lex has a really soft touch as a producer. He basically wanted people to come in without any rehearsal or planning and create on the spot. And everyone showed up with all of themselves the entire time.”
Mr. Price handles bass, joined by guitarist Tim Young (Fiona Apple, “The Late Late Show With James Corden” band), keyboardist Steve Moore (Laura Veirs, Sufjan Stevens) and drummer Ian Fitchuk (Kacey Musgraves). It was financed with a $26,000 Kickstarter campaign.
“I was hoping for an album with more electronic elements and more atmospheric depth,” she says. “I feel like this album pushed into that world beautifully. Lex really honed in on the alternative rock/pop aspects of my material, and stepped away from my tendency to offer instrumental solos or venture into folk or jazz. I hope to keep exploring those areas in my work, but I love how cohesive this album is.”