Kath Bloom

Kath Bloom is an American singer/songwriter from New Haven, Connecticut and started playing guitar as a teenager. She collaborated with Bruce Neumann in the early '70s, but it wasn't until she met avant-garde guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors in 1976 that she started recording. The pair recorded five albums of fragile, haunted, folk and blues melodies. Their collaboration ended in 1984 with the release of two albums, Restless Faithful Desperate and Moonlight. Love Explosion, Bloom's first solo album, was self-released in 1993; she didn't issue another one for 15 years. She returned to recording with 2008's Terror, and in 2015 she issued the album Pass Through Here, followed by 2017's This Dream of Life ‎for Mark Kozelek's Caldo Verde label. Bye Bye These Are the Days was released in 2020, followed in 2022 by the EP Long Way to Go Home. Bloom stopped recording after her collaborations with Connors ended; a period of financial hardship followed. A single mother, she focused on raising her children, rarely playing shows outside of New Haven. She recorded and privately released Love Explosion in 1993, her last outing for 15 years. Director Richard Linklater discovered Bloom's music sometime in the early '90s and subsequently featured her song "Come Here" in his 1995 film Before Sunrise. Encouraged by Linklater's interest in her music, Bloom started writing new songs and released Come Here: The Florida Years, in 1999. It was followed up with 1981-1984, a re-release of songs she had recorded with Connors. This retrospective was followed by Sing the Children Over in 2001, Kath Bloom and Loren MazzaCane Connors in 2002, and the retrospective collection Finally on Chapter Music in 2005. In 2008, Bloom issued Terror, which was recorded both solo and with backing from her Love at Work Band, followed in 2009 by a tribute album titled Loving Takes This Course: A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom. It featured 16 covers from contributors including Bill Callahan, Laura Jean, Mark Kozelek, Josephine Foster, and Meg Baird, and a dozen retrospective tracks. Bloom signed with Kozelek's Caldo Verde label for 2010's Thin Thin Line. She played occasional shows, but otherwise remained silent for another two years. In 2012, Here I Am, a five-track digital EP, was issued by Caldo Verde. Though she appeared on Pink City by Jennifer Castle and This Frontier Needs Heroes' The Future, Bloom focused on writing for the next two years. In 2014 she recorded in California for the first time, and emerged with the album Pass Through Here, for Chapter Music in early 2015. Recorded over five Los Angeles winters, Bloom's 19th full-length outing, 2017's This Dream of Life, included guest spots from Avi Buffalo, Imaad Wasif, and Kozelek. In 2018, Restless Faithful Desperate, with Connors, was reissued by Chapter Music. It was followed in 2019 by reissues of Moonlight and Sand in My Shoe. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, Bloom released Bye Bye These Are the Days, an album recorded the previous year with guitarist/vocalist David Shapiro and percussionist Flow Ness, and released by Michael Cormier's Dear Life Records. Sidelined by the pandemic, Bloom continued to write during quarantine. In September 2022, she released the EP Long Way to Go Home on C/Site Recordings.~ Thom Jurek