Formed in 2011 by Michael Cerveris (Fun Home, Fringe) and Kimberly Kaye, Loose Cattle sprung from the duo’s shared affection for the musical and emotional rough and tumble of Johnny Cash’s duets with June Carter Cash, crossed with X’s John Doe and Exene. Starting out by playing country covers in friends’ living rooms, Cerveris and Kaye quickly found themselves on stages from Lincoln Center to Jazz Fest & NPR’s Mountain Stage (with Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, Ari Hest and Ben Sollee), and their previous album Seasonal Affective Disorder praised by the likes of Rolling Stone Country, No Depression, Los Angeles Times & beyond. Michael Cerveris served as a sideman for Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould and shared stages with Pete Townshend, The Breeders, The Pixies’ Frank Black, Teenage Fanclub and beyond. He previously starred in films with Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini, and John C. Reilly, Broadway shows from The Who’s Tommy to Sweeney Todd, as well as Hedwig in NYC, LA and London’s West End, and in TV series Mindhunter, The Tick, Gotham, The Good Wife, Fringe, Treme and HBO’s upcoming The Gilded Age.
Kimberly Kaye cut her teeth on the road, traveling the Warped Tour circuit as a member of a ska band before shifting her attention to roots music, with a recent detour directing and co-starring in a wildly successful revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in New Orleans, garnering a Big Easy Award for her own performance as Yitsak. Loose Cattle’s current lineup also includes René Coman and Doug Garrison (Iguanas and Alex Chilton band) plus Rurik Nunan (The Whisky Gentry and Cracker) on fiddle.
With their new music video out for “Sidewalk Chicken” (an experience all dogowners can appreciate), Cerveris and Kaye filled us in on their ambitions for Loose Cattle — past, present, and future.
Explain the title of your album. Does your album have an overarching theme?
Naming a record is a big thing for us and we usually keep a running list from the time we start thinking about recording (sometimes, even before anything is written). The options range from the ridiculous to the way too serious and by the time we have to make a choice, we’ve usually gone through dozens of discarded ideas. With this record being our first proper studio album and in many ways our debut record, our early list of titles involved everything from, simply, the name of the band, to endless puns and plays on cattle words. When we thought we would be putting the record out in April of 2020, Herd Mentality was a leading contender. By the end of that dark year, Heard Immunity was gaining some traction, but….maybe too soon?
As we sank deeper into the Year That Time Forgot, like most everyone, we started to reassess everything about what we were doing with our time and our lives and our music. We asked ourselves what kind of music we thought people would want to hear by the time we might come out of all this. Hell, what kind of music did we want to hear? Or make? I don’t remember anymore which came first, the cover photograph or the album title, but Heavy Lifting was adopted almost immediately once we thought of it.
On the one hand, it accurately named what the past 15 months had been for everybody in their own ways. And on the other, as vaccines and a new administration and reckonings of many sorts were starting to make the nightmares we were living through seem less inevitable, we started to feel that collective sense of the heavy, lifting. The bulk of the songs on the record speak to that heaviness, and to the struggles and fortitude of oft forgotten people at the margins of life. But even more, hopefully, it speaks, with respect and some humor, of the fortitude and the spirit of the people who do the heavy lifting that keeps the more fortunate aloft. And to a hope that singing their stories will help us shoulder some of what they’ve had to lift alone too long.
How are you using your platform to support marginalized people?
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about this, especially in the last couple years. We handle almost every aspect of our business ourselves, but when we do get to pay someone else to do things we can’t, we make concerted efforts to work with people from marginalized communities and their allies. For instance, a major reason we chose Girlie Action for PR was specifically because they actively support a lot of BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and female artists and causes. When we have guest musicians, we make sure we reach out to our community of BIPOC artists and friends—not solely because they’re not white or straight, but because they’re fantastic musicians, which is a lot of why we found ourselves in New Orleans in the first place. We’re trying to put even more of our political and social beliefs and advocacy into our songwriting for the next record, and we use our social media platforms regularly to make space and advocate for progressive causes and vulnerable people. One of the few positives of the pandemic was the enforced time off to sit down, shut up, and listen. Really considering what marginalized people are saying, especially when it’s uncomfortable, then amplifying their voices when appropriate. We’re passionate about not doing business with venues or artists who don’t share our values. And we’re happy to invite bigots to leave our shows.
We all try to carry these principles into our non-music lives as well. Almost everyone in the band was born and raised in the South, and that’s meant needing to relearn our own whitewashed, tidied up history as it actually happened vs. the way it was taught to us in school. Kim’s day job is rooted in exactly that—she co-owns Hottest Hell Tours, which does these dark, non-revisionist history tours in New Orleans. They have real historians on staff to unearth the stories from the free people of color, slaves, immigrants and sex workers whose experiences got edited out of, or fetishized by, the narratives many of us were brought up reciting. They’re so adept at making a lot of privileged white people laugh at just how ridiculous our version of “history” has been, which is essential…when you preach at your peers about how they need to change, most stonewall or double down. But when you make them LAUGH at themselves, release some of that ego, then change is actually possible. We’ve been trying to integrate more of that into our songwriting and song choices lately, and you can hear some of it on this album: “Redneck Blue Collar” and “Get Downtown” both poke fun at some of that Rah-Rah Patriotism drilled into us since birth, just how irrational it is, but in that artful way where you’re laughing WHILE deciding to “do better” going forward.
Sidebar: if you like laughing at our own collective white nonsense while getting exposed to pieces of marginalized peoples’ erased history, definitely check out the tour company’s podcast, “Hottest Hell Presents.” Their researchers dig up these forgotten stories from all over the country, not just New Orleans, and do the non-revisionist retelling in sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking vignettes. They did this piece on the Meermin Slave Revolt that was just…actually just go listen, it’s damn good.
How do you feel your coming out journey plays into your music?
Kimberly: Honestly, Loose Cattle specifically is the reason I’m out AND a musician at all. When I came out women were only allowed to be lipstick femmes or butch. I’ve literally been bisexual and playing with gender since kindergarten, which back then meant “not gay enough” for my LGBT peers and “just weird” to heteros. At the exact same time I was studying music and theatre, and the message was identical—professors said my voice was neither “contemporary” nor classical enough to get a job. Casting agents complained I was simultaneously too girlie and too boyish. It was paralyzing. So I slipped back into the closet and quit music/performing entirely.
Then I met Michael who, despite being straight, happened to be a bit of a queer icon in the NYC theater bubble I came from thanks to his roles in Hedwig, Fun Home and others. AND he was a real deal musician. He insisted I should sing. He took me to diverse shows where the music, and people making it, were all over the spectrum. I got exposed these amazing, wise elder queers and versatile musicians, people who got onstage and LIVED “this is what I sound like, this is what I look like, I’m not living in pain for your comfort anymore so if you don’t like me, then this next song is for you ESPECIALLY.”
That vibe is woven throughout everything Loose Cattle does now. I’m the only queer person in the band, but not the only oddball. Our music sits in between genres. We’re personally happiest when the lead vocals are a duet, the right combination of masculine and feminine. If people don’t like it, we feel the next song is for them especially.
Is there a professional “bucket list” item you would love to check off?
Our band was founded on pretty modest goals. From the start, our intention was just to play small gigs, living room shows at our friends’ houses, and that made us really happy. Then, through a few twists of fate, we started getting random appearances in the kind of venues you usually work for years to get to, like Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series in New York, Jazz Fest in New Orleans, and a couple appearances on Mountain Stage in Michael’s home state of West Virginia. And we were thrilled and deeply grateful. But I think what we’d really love to do is be on tour as a support act for any of the many artists we love and admire. Just having a chance to tour and play our songs for the kind of people who like to discover new music and always come out to watch the opening act, like we do. Like we said, pretty humble dreams. Oh, and getting Dolly to hear our Jolene/Fuck You cover and getting her blessing. That’d be a dream come true.
Heavy Lifting is available on all platforms now.
Loose Cattle — Official, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp