Kathleen Dunbar and The Better Devils

Please check out my latest album! Gravity Man is an offering of love songs and songs about love that weaves joy, heartbreak, sorrow and humor into soulfully crafted songs in the americana style with flavors of folk, funk, blues, torch-style jazz, swing, rock, pop, celtic, psychedelic and dixieland. These are stories of loved fulfilled, unrequited love, self-love, family love, and the permutations of love lost and gained. Let your heart be moved and your feet dance as you take this journey through love’s unpredictable twists and turns.

Here’s a little deeper dive into my take on my music, and some background about my band The Better Devils.  Please also check out my music website, where you’ll find all my Americana songs, Videos, Upcoming Shows and More! Click on the Boots to take you to my Music Website: www.kathleendunbarmusic.com

A-Red Boots & Website

I’d like to tell you a little bit about my artistic interpretation of life as I express it in my music.

You may notice that many of my songs are about angels and devils, birth, life, death, about creation and crumbling destruction.

These are stories about us as we face the circumstances we humans get ourselves into and the choices that we ultimately make—some of them funky, some of them ending in the dark, others rising into the light of morning.

Touching, humorous, spellbinding storytelling—my songwriting brings you into the irony, the tragedy, and the possibilities of life. It’s about people and the life that happens to us.

My experiences have lead me to believe that universal truths apply to everyone because emotionally we share the same need to be loved.

I feel we are simultaneously angels and devils, alive and dying, creating and destroying. We want to be loved, understood and accepted—and sometimes we go into crazy gyrations and odd pathways in that very human search. The stories in these songs speak to our hidden desires, our shadow side, our untarnishible gold, our poison and our medicine.

When we deny our beauty, our joy, our creativity, our rage and sorrow—we become: Consumed. Addicted. Enthralled. Entranced. And then…by the hand of grace and the sweet mystery of our souls we may also Resurrect ourselves, Transform, Love and Blossom again. As far as the angels and the devils, there are different times in our lives when we are both. The wisdom is not to be one or the other. They are just energies we learn (or not!) to use. The wisdom is knowing when to be one or the other.

Sometimes you have to stand fast and use the muscles in your arms that are made to hold the boundary. Sometimes you have to take yourself away from the situation as your absence will make the poison stop. And sometimes you have to remember that you are fundamentally and unequivocally loveable, that people do love you, and that you need to love them back. And take them and be taken into their arms.

Quite a potent story cocktail, this being human.

When we are confronted with authentic prosperity, the thing that we’d like to do but don’t, what we wish for but won’t let ourselves receive, we allow ourselves to be eaten up by the dark of our own shadow, bumbling and unconscious and afraid, lost in the Underworld.

I try to hold on
I turn around and I find it’s all gone
There’s angels and devils won’t leave me alone
Makin bets on which road I follow back home

And the medicine—to love ourselves, including our shadow, as well as our light.

My Band, The Better Devils: I’m so THRILLED to have an awesome touring band! I call my band The Better Devils. They are SO much fun to play with! We come in various configurations—acoustic, electric, full band, trio, duo.  When somebody’s on the road on another project, we mix it up with who’s playin’. I love them all and so will you!

Screen shot 2012-11-11 at 5.12.53 PM_2Gawain Mathews gigs with me as my guitarist and banjo player. His magic thread runs all through the music you hear. He’s my arranger and producer. On my CDs he plays guitar, mandola, banjo, keyboards, accordion and percussion. Gawain hails from the wilds of Wales and the hot deserts of Utah (he prefers clouds to sun). He brings multiple skills as producer and arranger and years of musicianship in a wide range of styles. He’s toured as the guitarist for Mickey Hart. He was raised on folk music, played guitar with the Utah Symphony, has toured in the US, Australia and Europe with a variety of folks and has had his original music featured on Fox’s American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance. Currently he’s a music producer in the San Francisco Bay working with a diverse roster of clients and styles.  gawainmathews.com

Learn more about my amazing band, The Better Devils! They are awesome musicians! Read more here: kathleendunbarmusic.com/devils

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