Interview: Laura Boswell + Hannah Kaminer + Kathryn O’Shea
Tucked in a booth underneath the dim lights of a near empty Mexican restaurant, I’m joined by Asheville-based singer/songwriters Laura Boswell, Hannah Kaminer, and Kathryn O’Shea for what feels less like an interview and more like a release.
Laughter and chips fill the table as the three friends — who play The Grey Eagle’s outdoor stage on Sunday, Sept. 25 — share in mutual admiration and a mission to change the competitive landscape for women in the arts. Between bites and sips of margaritas, they recount the individual journeys that brought them together, and, throughout the conversation, they never stop celebrating one another.
“I knew that you were such a brilliant musician, a brilliant guitarist, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I'm not going to be able to keep up,’” O’Shea says to Boswell. “And then the way that you were just so fun and chill and gracious when we were playing together, it really helped me sort of unlock that part of myself and start collaborating with other people.”
O’Shea first met Boswell in 2018 at the Brown Bag Songwriting Competition finals at Asheville Music Hall. “Kathryn placed second and that night we both really connected with each other's music,” Boswell says. “I was going through a difficult time in my life and Kathryn really showed up. She was just an instant friend. Very kind.”
“Okay, here's the truth,” O’Shea says with a laugh. “I had heard Laura's music before the competition because I literally looked up everybody else — I am neurotic. I looked up Laura and I was like, ‘This woman is next-level.’ So the second I saw you, I just moseyed right up and was like, ‘You're great. I'm impressed by you.’ I think I might have waited until the end of sound check to pretend that I just heard you then.”
O’Shea was born in Asheville and raised in Mills River. “I wasn’t exactly surrounded by many left-leaning people,” she says. “But music came to me early. My mom is a singer/songwriter and she did the music program for the church that my dad was a minister at. My mom was singing there every week, and since she's a singer and that was in a lot of ways her whole identity — at least through the lens that I thought of the congregation of the church — singing just was kind of what I did as soon as I could talk.”
O’Shea’s distinctive vocals have been described as a “husky, low-toned moan” (Greenville Journal) with “a timbre as dynamic as Florence Welch” (Immersive Atlanta). From a young age, she had her mind set on professional performance.
“Theater was what caught my eye earliest as sort of a career move,” she says. “I started doing musical theater from the time I was 10 to the time I was about 25.” However, O’Shea eventually became jaded by the pressures placed on women in the industry. “I showed up hard for theater; theater never showed up for me. I was met with nothing but scrutiny about where I'm from, my body [and] my sexuality,” she says.
Through all of those hardships, O’Shea learned to play banjo for a project in school. “I was walking out of my bedroom one morning and I remembered, ‘Oh shit! I was supposed to turn in my senior project idea today.’ I looked in the corner of my living room as I'm about to leave for school and I see my grandfather's old four-string banjo, which to this day is still hanging in my apartment on the wall. I was like, ‘I guess I'll learn the banjo. It's there. It's easy enough,’” she recalls with another laugh. “Lo and behold, I found out it was a four-string, and I would be an idiot to learn a four-string today. I decided to get a five-string to learn that, and there we go — it was off.”
A few years later, O’Shea’s creative journey took another unexpected turn. “Puppets are literally what fucking saved me,” she says. “I'm not even kidding. I was working in a restaurant when I was 21, my dad had passed away six months earlier, suddenly, and this woman that I used to sing in a choir with when I was like 10 years old walks into the restaurant — Lisa Sturz. She said, ‘Oh my god, Katie! What are you doing working in a restaurant? I need puppeteers!’”
O’Shea and her puppets toured elementary schools across the country, traveling by van for a year. “I eventually realized that puppetry was everything that I loved about theater without asking me as the person creating the experience to look or present in any certain way,” she says.
However, O’Shea knew that puppetry wasn’t her final form. “After a couple of years of that I was like, I don't know if this is my life love but I'm ready to leave theater behind.” It was through this experience that O’Shea transitioned away from theater and into song.
“The through-line in music has always been clear, and it's singing,” she says. “No matter what else is in the mix, whether it's puppets; whether it's theater; whether it's the banjo; whether I don't want an instrument in my hand at all; whether it's a choir. I have never once doubted that singing means the whole world, and that it makes me better when I spend time with it. It's my greatest love, you know?”
Boswell, who was described by Grammy Award-winning songwriter Mike Reid as “a vibrant, wholly original, deeply personal young artist,” also started her musical journey as a child. A native of Pennsylvania, she and her brother both began taking piano lessons at an early age. “My parents were very supportive of music,” she says.
When taking guitar lessons in fifth grade, Boswell had a revelation. “My friends and I were obsessed with the Dixie Chicks, and I remember asking in my first group guitar lesson, ‘I want to learn “Cowboy, Take Me Away,”’ and [the instructor] let me down easy because the guitar part's a little hard,” she says with a laugh. “But I was like, ‘Oh, cool! I can learn all the songs that I’m listening to on the radio on guitar.”
As Boswell got older, she began writing her own songs. “I had my first opportunity to perform my own music when I was in high school. I went to a boarding school for 11th and 12th grade, and one of my friends would hear me playing in my room. I was very shy about it, and gradually she got me to come out and then we would sing, like, ‘Iris’ by the Goo Goo Dolls,” Boswell says. “And then she signed me up for this concert for Amnesty [International] that the school put on every year,” Boswell says. “I was shaking. I was so nervous. But I got so many people being like, ‘Those were your songs?’ It made me keep wanting to do it, even though it was scary.”
Boswell’s early success doesn’t surprise Kaminer. “Laura has the amazing ability to decide she's going to do something and actually nail it,” she says. “Kathryn and I both like to be determined, too, and we're courageous in our own ways, but more laid back in some ways. [Laura] has enthusiasm that I have never had. I am like the Eeyore and I met someone who is like Piglet or Tigger.”
Kaminer, who grew up in Black Mountain and Yancey County, is a staple in the Western North Carolina songwriting scene. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest, and in 2017 she was awarded the Regional Artist Project Grant from a coalition of WNC arts councils. Her folk/Americana style is heavily influenced by the region’s musical traditions, specifically the old-time genre.
“Jean Ritchie is a huge figure in the old-time ballads, and I kind of went down the rabbit hole for a while and listened to a bunch of her stuff,” Kaminer says. “I just like the idea that you can have a voice be kind of bare bones and really haunting. For me, that comes from listening to a bunch of Appalachian music: Don't try to make it pretty, because you're not trying to be pretty; you're trying to haunt somebody.”
I ask if Kaminer would describe her music as haunting. “I think I'm trying to exorcize my own ghosts,” she says. “There's a lot of things that bother me and I don't really like to face my emotions head-on. And so writing about them is a way to weave through the swamp of icky emotions.”
Boswell echoes that sentiment. “Music is a vehicle or a bridge to cross over and deal with some of the emotions a little more removed,” she says. “That's how songwriting started for me. I have this heartbreak or I have this loss or this pain and it felt easier to channel it into music, into songs. And singing is a total release — physically, it's a full-body activity. But you're in your present, too, so I feel like it grounds you in your body.”
Kaminer and Boswell met in late 2019 while taking classes at the now defunct Asheville Improv Collective. “It was a great experience for me,” Kaminer says. “I had heard that it was really good for people with anxiety, and I just kind of wanted a sense of boldness in my life that was not there. I encountered Laura in Level Three and I knew her name. I knew that she was a musician and I thought she was really gorgeous and put-together, and so I was super intimidated. I did not try to be her friend.”
The memory inspires more laughter for Kaminer before continuing the recollection. “I can be a little catty sometimes at the beginning when I'm first meeting people,” she admits. “I think that's another thing that we're sort of taught to do as women. My dream is to be able to be around other women and it not feel competitive. I feel more like, ‘Let's spur each other on to great things! Even if you overshadow me, I'll be over here shining some other way.’”
In 2020, Kaminer began producing the Music for Quarantine series, a platform for sending virtual concerts to loved ones stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic’s lockdown period. “I knew a bunch of my musician friends were out of work really fast and I was like, ‘Isolation is going to be the worst part of this pandemic, and also unemployment. We have something that we can offer each other. I’ll create some kind of system where people can sign up to give a concert to someone who's quarantined or isolated, and then I'll farm out the request to my musician friends who don't have work,’” she says. “I needed something productive to do with my angst, too. I didn't want to play these concerts myself, and people were asking for styles that I had no idea how to play. Fortunately, I knew Laura knew how to play a ton of these styles.”
Kaminer quickly fell in love with the process of pairing artists to shows. “I started to enjoy it more than I had been enjoying my actual gigs — this matchmaking process. Because I was realizing there's something really connected about it and generous. And I was like, ‘I have got to figure out how to bring some of this into my music, because I'm sort of bored with myself,’ but I didn't really have any ideas on how to do that. I'm still kind of trying to figure that out, although I do host a songwriter gathering in my driveway. It's called BASSAS: Bring a Song, Sing a Song.”
It was this desire for real-world collaboration that brought Boswell, Kaminer, and O’Shea together for an in-person show in late 2020. “The only shows I was really able to do were outdoors,” says Kaminer, in reference to the still early stages of the pandemic. “It was October; it was freezing cold. We got booked, the three of us, to do a Western Carolina Writers showcase, a woman's showcase. [Hendersonville-based singer/songwriter] Nick Mac is the mastermind behind that. He asked me, ‘Who's a girl who can play lead?’ And I was like, ‘Laura Boswell,’ because I knew from Music for Quarantine. I got over my hideous cattiness, and as a result we had this amazing, very freezing-cold show. We were all super bundled up, we played together, and we just so connected, and we were laughing so hard.”
“It was like the show equivalent of a first date that you didn't even know was a date,” O’Shea says. “And now you're in love.” Like many great relationships, theirs is built on the understanding that their differences are what make them stronger.
“We all have very different backgrounds and training, so it's not just even our different temperaments. What we're bringing to the table is a whole lot of different life experience and training,” Kaminer says. “I would say I’m not even that great of a collaborator but I feel super encouraged by how hard you guys are going after things, because I'm like, ‘I could go hard after the things I want.’ You might not be even be working on the same thing, collaborating, but I'm in a community of people who are like, ‘Yeah, let's be more successful together!’”
Boswell agrees: “The more success each one of us has, we bring it to each other. We’re a unit in terms of the connections that we build, and our booking connections. We share them with each other and we offer each other gigs.”
This collaborative approach is in opposition to the competitive mindset often ingrained in women, especially in the arts. “You find a bunch of competition, and I think that's because everybody in the music industry is so goddamn worn down” O’Shea says. “We're just looking for the easiest path to stability. Everybody's just looking at the list of, like, ‘Do you have music theory? Do you have the look?’ Everybody's just hungry and really driven by scarcity mindset.”
“There is an interesting pressure around having a certain look,” Kaminer adds. “I've even noticed myself hesitating if my body changes or if I can't find the right outfit. I just want to show up and play music but I feel pressured to wear cowboy boots and the right shade of lipstick and have this sort of Americana look — which is sometimes really fun, so I'm not knocking that. But if that's a requirement, you need to look like this in order to be in this space, in order to be on this bill, I really don't like that. It’s debilitating.”
But these women are trying to change that standard.
“It's inevitable right now. But if we keep fucking acting like it's inevitable, it's going to be inevitable forever. If we start looking for other things to prioritize and stop talking so goddamn much about what people are wearing and how they look then I wonder what else we would focus on? Perhaps it would be the words or the skill or the voice.”
“The media side of it could do better, too, and ask different questions,” Kaminer says. “I think that's why it's really exciting that you're writing for Mountain Xpress and Asheville Stages, because it's kind of boring after a while, honestly. I have a soul in here, so why are you talking about just this one part of me all the time? I've got a really good soul — not morally good, just like a really cool butterfly. It's like a mosaic and to be reduced to one tile is so annoying.”
Witness the rich tapestry of talent embodied by all three women yourself, and help support their movement for positive, equitable change.
IF YOU GO
Who: Laura Boswell, Hannah Kaminer, and Kathryn O’Shea
When: Sunday, Sept. 25, 5 p.m.
Where: The Grey Eagle, 185 Clingman Ave., thegreyeagle.com
Tickets: $15
(Photo by Morgan Bost)
