Rediscovering the voluptuous folk music of Karen Black
Karen Black could sing like she acted: with raw nerves exposed and strange, radiant honesty.
Most remember her warbling heartbreak in Nashville (she wrote those songs herself), or crooning eerily from the passenger seat in Five Easy Pieces. But despite the haunting presence of her voice in so many cult classics, Black never launched a music career. That part of her soul, rather regrettably, was largely hidden.
However, she did leave behind an album’s worth of original music that was partially produced by recording legends Bones Howe (The Mamas and the Papas, 5th Dimension, Tom Waits, The Turtles) and Elliot Mazer (Neil Young, The Band, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt). The tapes, caked in mould, were taken to her friend, musician Cass McCombs, by her husband, Stephen Eckelberry. They took three years to repair, and many of the details of the sessions that produced this music were lost to the passing of time. One of the boxes even held a cover of ‘Question’ by the Moody Blues.
Dreaming of You (1971–1976) gathers these recordings – including six songs recorded with Howe – together for the first time. They have a Laurel Canyon folkie/Judy Collins feel to them and there is a certain mysteriousness to her confessional compositions. Ever the actor, Black would do multiple takes of a song, each time changing her tone, phrasing, or cadence. “We went looking for a needle in a haystack, and ended up with a haystack of needles,” McCombs says.
“I dislike when people try to pigeonhole me, when all I want is to do good work.”
Karen Black
It’s an astonishing little time capsule – part séance, part acid-folk confession booth – crackling with that uncanny Karen Black energy. Her voice, smoky, uncertain, sometimes teetering on the edge of melody, doesn’t always hit the note, but that’s not the point. These aren’t polished pop songs; they’re transmissions from another reality where actors made records in Laurel Canyon motels under the influence of gin, cigarettes, and maybe one too many astrology charts. It’s cult music in the best sense—music for the outcasts and the late-night headphone weirdos.
Even in her most vulnerable moments, you get the feeling she’s performing for a camera just out of frame—shifting personas, playing dress-up with pain. There are shades of Karen Dalton, Judy Henske, and even Nico, but always refracted through Black’s own deeply strange lens. One moment she’s a doomed lounge singer whispering about betrayal, the next she’s a seeress on Mulholland Drive, scribbling lyrics on napkins between takes. If she’d released this in the ’70s, it would’ve ended up in a milk crate next to Starsailor, No Other, and Judee Sill’s Heart Food.
Black duetted with McCombs several times on his albums, and he was in the process of setting Black’s words to music when she died. “She’d given me all of her poetry and I was trying to work them into some kind of meter that would work as songs,” he says. They recorded two of them, I Wish I Knew The Man I Thought You Were and Royal Jelly. These songs are included as a bonus 45 with the vinyl release.
Dreaming of You doesn’t just restore Karen Black’s lost music; it reanimates her spirit. The album hums with the same beautiful strangeness that haunted her best roles. It’s the sound of a woman singing to herself in a quiet room, maybe not expecting anyone to ever hear. And now we do.