So in case you haven’t heard, Kudzu Kids have officially broken up. Word of the split came two weeks ago, when guitarist and vocalist Krista Williamson slipped the band’s final recording, Lady, onto the atlDIY Facebook page, and added bluntly that her beloved indie trio was a band no longer. As departures go, it was neither elegant nor all that informative, but the news spread anyway.
Like many people, we were gutted about the announcement. We pegged the record as one to watch for this year — and, indeed, it’s a beaut, as seven coiled and rain-flecked memoirs that beam in on an estranged household from several angles. Mind, Lady doesn’t throttle listeners like the Kids’ thrilling debut Adolescence, but it doesn’t have to; Williamson roots us in place with her direct honesty, with such damning lines like “If you can’t do the dishes, then why do you exist?” and “You’ve got potential, but you’re such a waste.” To see such a lovely, superbly focused EP just tossed online, with barely a shrug from Williamson, made me think that she’d been bruised somehow by this split, as if she couldn’t love or value anything she’d written with her former mates. And I mean, as a writer who’s also parted with certain other outlets and editors, I get it — the artist is her own worst critic, after all.
Now, I’m not usually one to lean on the backstories of the albums I review, but diving blindly into this one felt… wrong. So I tapped Williamson — gingerly, at first — to find out what happened. As she tells it, the dissolution of Kudzu Kids was merely an inevitable drift: after meeting three years ago in high school, Williamson now studies at Kennesaw, while her bandmates still live an hour away in their hometown of Jasper. But aside from the physical distance, Williamson also felt a rift growing between her mates’ goals and her own. “Music is something [bassist] Chaz [Brooks] and [drummer] Tyler [Schreck] would like to do for a living, but I do not,” she tells me via email. “It’s an outlet for me to express what’s on my mind in a creative way, and it’s not something I take completely seriously.”
Indeed, as our conversation shifted to the EP itself, Williamson unraveled the uncomfortable memories stacked within Lady’s lyrics. That tangible thread of bitterness that I’d traced in the album before was, in fact, an ongoing motif in Williamson’s childhood, as her father stumbled into meth addiction and terrorized the rest of the family. “I wanted to write something that really emphasized how lonely it is to be a child in an abusive household, and how my other family members perceived it as well,” Williamson says.
As for the album’s namesake? That’s her beloved dog, a steadfast companion to both mother and child in the domestic minefield that her father projected. Sometimes Williamson speaks from her point of view, as in “Rain”: “I want to stick my head out of the window / but it’s raining.” At other times, like in “Dirty Magazines,” walks with Lady offer a brief respite from the heated arguments between Williamson’s parents, so violent that the child would run and hide in the trees to escape: “I’ll live here forever so no one can hurt me.”
Williamson wasn’t the only one who found solace in Lady’s presence. Writing from her mother’s perspective in the title track, she sings, “I like to take my pisses in the woods / because I don’t wanna stay inside that house.” It’s an ominous line that only grows darker when placed in context. “My mom bought a kayak when I was a kid,” Williamson explains, “and she would take me and Lady, and we’d all go to the lake and stay away from our house, because we didn’t wanna be around such a bad environment. ‘I like to take my pisses in the woods’ is my attempt at trying to explain how my life at home was so bad that my mom would rather stay outside than be around it.”
Given Williamson’s current flood of songs with her new project, King Luka, I was dead curious to know what occupation the songwriter really wanted to pursue instead of music. “I want to be an architect,” she answers. “I really love drawing pictures of landscapes and making blueprints for houses. I grew up very poor, so I’m trying to at least become middle class and have some financial stability. If my music ever does pick up and gain some momentum, then that would definitely be ideal, but I’m also very aware that there’s an incredibly slim chance of that actually happening. So right now, music is just my hobby, and college and work are my main priorities.”
So while Lady might be the last we hear from Kudzu Kids, Williamson plans to hang around a while longer as King Luka. And if this EP is any indication of what we can expect in the future, she’s bound to captivate us again, even without her old high school friends by her side.
More Info
Bandcamp: kudzukids.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @kudzukidsofficial