Finding Roots

Singer-songwriter Krista Detor found inspiration and international success in a place she never expected.

Krista Detor takes a break to care for the plants in her home on the outskirts of Bloomington. She estimates she spends around 12 hours a day working on her music business.

Photo by Anna Makris

Family and friends are gathered around the dining room table by candlelight, finishing off bowls of mushroom risotto — scraping the dishes with pieces of bread between sips of red wine. Krista is in the kitchen with her husband, David, and his brother Robert, plating the next course. Tonight is her daughter Aurora’s last dinner with them for a year. She’s graduated from Indiana University and is leaving for a year in China where she’ll teach English.

Krista stops serving and moves behind Aurora’s chair, wrapping her arms around her chest. She starts to sing with a rich and melodic timbre as the roomful of chatting guests and clattering dishes falls silent. “And I … will always love you…” Krista moves around the table from Aurora to her step-daughter Lena, placing her hands on her shoulders. The daughters exchange glances and chuckle at the familiar Whitney Houston chorus, but tears well up in their eyes. No one makes a sound until she finishes, and even then, they let her voice linger in the silence a little while longer.

Krista started writing songs soon after moving to Bloomington. “I thought if I can get them out of my head and out of my system, I’ll move on,” she says.

Photo by Kendall Fleder

The next time I see Krista, it’s midday, and we’re sitting at the same dining room table. Sunlight filters through the kitchen window, past her budding lemon tree, and rests on her face. She’s looking out at the 37-acre property she owns with her husband on the outskirts of Bloomington. She crosses her arms and pushes her horn-rimmed glasses up her nose. Her shoulder-length, curly hair is tucked behind her ears.

“Success in the music industry is about so much more than, ‘Did you work hard, are you good at it, are you attractive enough?’” Krista says. “Everything is about timing.”

Krista’s path to success is paved with turning points — moments where her life could have gone in another direction entirely. When she released her first solo commercial album “Mudshow” in 2006, she was about to turn 40. Within a month of its release, “Mudshow” was No. 1 on the Euro-Americana charts and jump-started her success as a singer-songwriter and pianist.

In the 12 years since, Krista has released five additional albums and toured extensively across Europe and the United States.

Her success didn’t go unnoticed. Rolling Stone magazine once referred to her as “a small miracle,” while a critic in The Boston Herald wrote, “All songwriters should be this good.”

Now, over a decade after “Mudshow,” she and David are focusing on a new endeavor. The Hundredth Hill, their up-and-coming retreat, is a space for artists to be creative and inspired in the natural beauty of their property. The transition is just one more unexpected, but fitting, turn in her life.

The next afternoon, Krista offers us a tour of the property, which begins at the driveway, a sort of primitive parking lot. We’re greeted by a cacophony of barking dogs, squawking chickens and Ghede, the family pig, who squeals his welcome.

“My daughters pulled some Jedi mind trick on me with this one,” Krista says, chuckling as she tosses oats at Ghede. The family’s large fluffy dogs, Gryffin, a chow mix, and Luna, a white lab, trail in and out of buildings behind us as Krista points out things they’ve collected over the years and structures David has built.

When David bought the property more than 20 years ago, it was five acres with a small two-bedroom house. Today, their property comprises nearly 40 acres, and the house is two stories with four bedrooms and a recording studio. Only the beams tucked away in the walls come from the original home, built in 1920.

Although David says he didn’t have a lot of experience working on construction projects before he remodeled the family home, he did some research and got good advice along the way. “At this point, it’s just sort of second nature to drop into stuff,” he says. “The way to finish your project is to start it, and everything else follows.”

A picket fence extends from the main house and ends abruptly with the words, “Wedding Wall” written in a faded — but still luminous — yellow paint. David built the fence for their wedding, more than 10 years ago. Barely legible good wishes from loved ones are scattered across the fence, written in ink that wasn’t designed to hold up to Indiana weather. Yet those wishes, like Krista herself, are still here.

“I had no intentions of ever moving to the middle of nowhere,” Krista reminisces. “Never to small-town Indiana.”

Krista stands in the kitchenette of one of the two “tiny houses” David built as part of their artists retreat, the Hundredth Hill.

Photos by Anna Makris

David, Krista and their dog Luna enjoy the sun on a bench that overlooks a trail that runs through their property.

Originally from Los Angeles, Krista had a coastal, big-city upbringing but was raised by Midwestern parents who grew up in Indiana and North Dakota.

Krista was only 6 when she encountered a piano that past tenants had left in her family’s new home. She begged her parents to keep it, and they agreed. By high school, Krista could play by ear and accompany herself.

After graduating from California State University with a degree in classical piano performance, Krista and her husband at the time, also a musician, started a life traveling from one opportunity to the next. Music was always in the background. Krista directed musical theater at an army base in South Korea and played in a classic ‘90s punk rock band in Louisiana.

Then, she started a career in commercial real estate in Oregon. “I felt like I made the best grown-up and practical decision,” she says. She was in her mid-20s, her husband was in culinary school, and she had a baby daughter, Aurora. “It was good pay, good benefits, and the people were nice. I probably would’ve done really well. But, at the end of the day, I was just hoping for a time when I could be doing something that was more fulfilling.”

The doors opened for another opportunity — to start a restaurant in the Florida Keys — and Krista thought it might lead to that future. The restaurant gave her an opportunity to play for crowds, mostly covers like Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” or Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

“I had a little girl and a completely different life plan,” Krista says. “I thought maybe just playing music in the restaurant with my husband was fine.”

Krista was entering her 30s when divorce cut that life plan short. After running the restaurant alone for a while, she decided to come to Bloomington, where her mother had resettled during retirement. She endearingly refers to this phase as the time she “moved back into her parents’ basement.”

“I came to save some money, lick my wounds and figure out how I had gotten every single thing wrong about love and marriage.”

Krista intended to stay in Bloomington for one year. Aurora was starting kindergarten, and she wanted to give her daughter stability while she plotted their next move. She got a job as the head of catering at IU, working nights and spending her days with Aurora. In the meantime, she met a group of people putting together a CD. She joined them, bringing in songs she had been writing on the side.

“I thought if I can record all the songs, get them out of my head and out of my system, then I’ll move on,” she recalls.

Krista’s colleagues took her to Airtime Recording Studio to work with local producer David Weber.

I had no intentions of ever moving to the middle of nowhere. Never to small-town Indiana." – Krista Detor

David had moved in 1989 to Bloomington, where he graduated with a recording degree from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. After graduation, he had a three-year stint working with a traveling circus as a trapeze artist. He returned to Bloomington, where he purchased a home with his then-wife, had two daughters, Lena and Isla, and opened his recording business. He built Airtime as an extension of his house, and Krista says she felt immediately at home.

After the recording session, David approached Krista with a suggestion that would change both their lives. He told her she should come back and record her own CD. “There are people in this town that need to know you’re here,” he told her.

She began collaborating and recording with David, made other connections in town and began to see the benefits of raising her daughter here. She started to rethink her one-year plan.

“I knew that people thought this place was beautiful, but I thought, That’s because they haven’t seen the Pacific Northwest,” Krista says, laughing. “But one morning about two years in, I was driving down the road, and I looked over and saw the hay bales in the mist in the early morning sunrise. All of a sudden, I went, ‘Oh my god, this place is beautiful.’”

Around this time, Bloomington Playwrights Project Director Richard Perez convinced Krista to write and perform a one-woman show titled “Slightly Deranged: A Thinking Woman’s Tour D’Vorce.” She refers to the show as a dramatic and cathartic cabaret about being left in the Gulf of Mexico. It captured the attention of the Bloomington community.

Krista and David began to play small gigs around town as a duo, from coffee shops to fundraisers. Around this time, their relationship grew romantic. Violins started to play, she jokes, and she could see herself running toward David in a field full of daisies.

David says their daughters were immediately best friends. Krista and Aurora moved in about a year after Krista and David began dating.

During that first year of living with David, Krista toyed with the idea of writing a whole album in a week — a creative challenge. “She set it as a goal but didn’t think much of it outside of that,” David says. “There was no pressure, just an exercise, really.”

One morning, Krista decided it was time to see if she could do it. Her first song for the project, “Buffalo Bill,” was inspired by a man David had met in the circus. That song paved the way for the rest of “Mudshow” — a slang term for traveling circuses that set up in big fields and left behind muddy messes. If I sing it sweet, and I sing it low, maybe he’ll come back this way ... him and his wild west show …

For the week that she wrote the album, Krista was on a creativity streak, David says. “I would wake up in the morning, and she would have been up since 4 a.m. and had a new song, and I would just start recording it.”

All the songs on “Mudshow” are inspired by real people. Krista would walk around Bloomington and write songs about those she met. “Abigayle’s Song,” she says, is about a popular waitress at Michael’s Uptown Café.

One more letter I write without sending, one more night without sleep. One more phone call I’ll let go on ringing, one less secret to keep.

But she also drew inspiration from the nature that surrounded her in Bloomington. “I would not have written an album like ‘Mudshow’ had it not been for moving here and getting back in touch with my mother’s roots and just being in the Midwest, where almost everyone is a storyteller,” Krista says.

Initially, Krista and David shared the album only with musician friends like Slats Klug and Carrie Newcomer. Their enthusiastic reviews convinced them to give the album a full production and send it off to a contact in Europe. He replied with information they would need to send the album to DJs across Europe.

Krista and David were apprehensive. Money was tight, and they couldn’t be sure the investment would lead to anything. Still, they produced, packaged and shipped over 150 CDs across Europe at $10 a package.

Within a month, Krista was No. 1 on Americana charts for Germany, Holland and Belgium. And she had offers for multiple record deals. Much of Americana music, with roots in folk, country and bluegrass, evolved from European ballads, and Krista’s sound attracted European listeners.

The timing felt predestined. The 2008 financial crisis hit the United States just as music was becoming digital, and piracy issues rocked the industry. Record companies lost copious amounts of money spent to promote mainstream musicians.

As a result, individual artists had more responsibility to promote themselves, but they also had creative freedom. Krista, in her 40s at the time, recognized the opportunity.

She decided to manage her career in Europe from her home in Bloomington — a goal that required diligent multitasking. For the past decade, she has dealt with six agents in six different countries, taken care of her family and her home, toured extensively and produced new music. She was spending about 12 hours a day on her music business.

During that time, Krista collaborated with a series of artists on projects like “The Breeze Bends the Grass,” a musical that featured the lives of four women artists at the turn of the 20th century, and “Wilderness Plots,” a series of concerts featuring other Indiana musicians

Krista feeds oats to Ghede, the family pig. The Detor-Weber family also has dogs, chicken and a cat on their 37-acre property, which is a retreat for visiting artists.

Photo by Anna Makris

performing songs inspired by Scott Russell Sanders’ book of the same name.

Scott says her ability to work with others and generate a creative and supportive environment is part of her talent as an artist. “At the root of all art is an impulse of generosity,” he says. “Most artists don’t become artists to make money. They become artists because they want to create something and share it with the world.”

A couple of years ago, at the 10-year mark, she started to reassess what success meant for her. She decided to end the nonstop touring and only do shows she wanted to do. It wasn’t an easy decision.

“In some ways, it felt like a failure, until I realized that fame never was my big objective. It was always just music and writing and connecting with other people in that process.”

Now, as with so many pivotal moments in Krista’s life, the timing is right for the next opportunity. In 2016, the neighboring 32 acres came up for sale. Last year, Isla graduated from high school and Aurora from IU. Krista and David started discussing their dream for an artist residency.

The Hundredth Hill got its name both from the hills that surround them and a phenomenon called the hundredth-monkey effect. Scientists hypothesized that you only need to teach a lesson to the first 100 people in a group in order for it to spread to the rest of the group. You don’t need to reach everyone, but if you reach enough people, you can make a lasting impact.

Currently, they have two “tiny houses” where artists recording at the studio can stay. The houses are made almost completely of repurposed materials. Like the people who gather here, each piece has a story to tell. Inside one house, the wall is painted white with “Postcards from the Artists in Residence” written at the top. Signatures, dates and doodles are scattered underneath.

The residency is a part of her dream for a destination where people come together to be creative and inspire one another. She wants to give back to the community that has given her so much. She credits her time in Indiana — and the generous people she met along the way — as giving her not only the success she found as an artist, but her family and her home.

“In a bizarre way, Indiana was my greatest inspiration,” she says. “It was a culmination point for all of my dreams to come true.”

By Jessica Smith