At Work: This Is The Kit
It’s impossible not to ask Kate Stables about The National. The singer-songwriter, who performs under the name This Is the Kit, was a key guest contributor on the band’s eighth LP, I Am Easy to Find; she recruited multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner to produce her 2015 record, Bashed Out; and she wrote most of the latest Kit album, Off Off On, while touring with the band. But their influence on her music is more subtle and peripheral than one might expect. “Last year, for my birthday, I asked for an Ebow,” she says with a laugh, referring to an electronic guitar device that’s used to create sustained, violin-like notes. “And I’m sure that has a lot to do with Bryce [Dessner] because he’s such an Ebow master. If he wants to take the credit for that, he totally can.”
That eerie guitar effect is all over Off Off On, which she recorded with her formidable live band and journeyman producer Josh Kaufman, best known for his work with Bob Weir, Craig Finn, Josh Ritter and the Day of the Dead project. Stables first met Kaufman when he joined This Is the Kit on guitar for a show in New York before the release of 2017’s Moonshine Freeze— and she was so impressed by his playing that they stayed in touch, leading to a collaborative cover of Osibisa’s “Woyaya” that also featured Kaufman’s Bonny Light Horseman bandmate Anaïs Mitchell.
When Stables started work on her latest project, she knew that the producer would bring some unique arrangement ideas to her songs, which were anchored, as always, by her meditative lyrics and gentle, ornamental vocal melodies. “He’s really intuitive,” she says of Kaufman. “He managed to find little musical parts that fit completely into what I like.”
The LP’s centerpiece is the hypnotic “This Is What You Did,” a folk-rock gem laced with banjo, saxophone and overlapping voices. “I love it when people are singing or saying different words at the same time, and you can’t totally make all of it out at once,” Stables says. “A lot of it is like an internal dialogue and thought loops.” It’s a “cacophony” that, much like Off Off On as a whole, is rendered smooth.
