YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN

Katherine Paul of Black Belt Eagle Scout finds new sounds in her Swinomish homelands

BY BECKY CARMAN

Katherine “KP” Paul didn’t mean to write an album in the uncertain summer of 2020, but homecomings have a knack for surprise. Known by band moniker Black Belt Eagle Scout, the singersongwriter and multi-instrumentalist spent 13 years embedded in Portland’s indie-rock scene before moving back to her ancestral homelands of the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in Washington’s Salish Sea, where her new full-length The Land, The Water, The Sky snuck up on her.

Reconnecting to her people and her land in the small community — the reservation and nearby town of La Conner are only a few thousand strong collectively — yielded unexpected inspiration for Paul. The return came as she was reframing not only her life, moving with her partner and his children to be closer to her thenailing parents, but also her relationship to music as a career during the height of the pandemic.

Paul’s resulting third LP as Black Belt Eagle Scout, released last month on Saddle Creek, documents this turbulent time in her life: the heaviness of trauma and the lightness of healing, the melancholy of change and the comfort of community. It also chronicles a connection to the land and sea around her, and the generations of ancestors who walked those paths. Boulder Weekly spoke with Paul about uprooting, coming home again, and accidentally making a record about it.

How does it feel to live [on the Swinomish Reservation] now versus when you were a kid? It feels the same, honestly. When I moved home, it was kind of a sigh of relief — like, this is where I’m from, this is who I am. But I feel like it also comes with this awareness of all the things that are happening politically within my community, culturally, socially, that I didn’t necessarily understand the nuances of when I was a kid. It just brings more knowledge, living here as an adult. It’s aging; it’s growing; it’s becoming wiser. You’re on your track to becoming an elder.

So through all of this transition, you’re writing songs but not writing an album. The title, though — The Land, The Water, The Sky — all of those are very pervasive throughout.

It’s just a moment in time in my life that I’m documenting, and it happens to be about this transitional time. One of the things that was really instrumental in making this album was very much feeling supported by Takiaya [Reed, album producer] and feeling like she had my back in the recording process. … On previous albums, I did all the things myself: recording, instruments, producing. It was different this time because whenever I would have an idea, she would say, “Let’s go for it.” In the past, I feel like I’ve kind of fought myself on it, like, “No, maybe I shouldn’t do that.”

On the production side, you had this task of conveying a sense of an actual physical location through instrumentation. How do you make a studio album feel large, like open space? There was one very instrumental pedal that we used pretty much throughout the entire record, I think on every song. That’s a Strymon Big Sky, a reverb pedal that has so many different types of reverb on it and creates this really just kind of lush and beautiful atmosphere, which was I think the thing that lifted up the songs and made them float and kind of come together in this way. It definitely has a very kind of natural vibe

It’s also just bringing myself into connecting, playing the guitar and having that feeling of what the song’s energy should be. This is the place it’s coming from. This is where I wrote it.

Read the full Q&A at boulderweekly.com by scanning this QR code.