Show Review & Photo Gallery: Sarah King & Samantha Grimes at kj’s Hideaway
Two fiery singer-songwriters put on an unforgettable show at a unique St. Paul venue.
Sarah King. Photo credit: Tom Smouse.
It’s no secret I like local music. I prefer experiencing music live versus recorded, so focusing on Midwest (especially Twin Cities) acts gives me more chance of finding favorites I can see over and over. But the pandemic lockdown necessitated a change; as many local artists disappeared from the public eye for long stretches of time, I trawled Instagram for livestreams and recorded music regardless of location and ended up falling hard for a few non-local artists. It was great, but it just so happened most of them were not national touring acts, which hampers my natural proclivity for live performances.
Sarah King was one of those discoveries. Trained in opera and experienced in hard rock, she’s turned her unique vocal and songwriting talents to an Americana sound that’s equal parts country, blues and rock. A single song was enough to get me supporting a Kickstarter for her 2021 EP, The Hour, and her livestreams helped sustain me through the long dreary live-music-less lockdown. I even interviewed her via Zoom in 2021.
But the chance of seeing her live was slim, at least for a while. Based in Vermont, she focuses her touring regionally, generally sticking to the East Coast, venturing out to Nashville a few times a year. I jumped at the chance to experience her music live at the 2022 Folk Alliance conference in Kansas City MO, but after that I wasn’t sure when I’d get to see her again.
Luckily that chance came in July 2023! King arranged a tour of festivals and smaller venues through the Midwest and into Montana, and one of the stops was kj’s Hideaway in St. Paul. This speakeasy-esque venue is tucked away in the basement of the Hamm Building, an early 1900s downtown structure just across the courtyard from the Palace Theatre. The space that kj’s occupies was the final location of the Artists’ Quarter, a long-running jazz club, for over a decade until it closed in 2014. With its low stage, outstanding sound and table seating close to the front, kj’s is tailor-made for a more intimate show with a listening-room atmosphere (although I’ve also seen it packed and rowdy a time or two before!).
The night opened with some local talent: Wisconsin-based (formerly from Minnesota) Samantha Grimes. Although she was new to me, as soon as I saw “murder-folk” in her website bio, I knew this would be a great pairing with King. That became even more clear when Grimes took the stage. From her powerhouse vocals and flair for vivid story songs to her disarmingly funny stage presence, even down to her reddish hair and use of the piano for a couple songs, Grimes’s personality and performance dovetailed with what I knew King would deliver. (They’re even both finalists in this year’s Great River Folk Festival Songwriter Contest!)
Samantha Grimes. Photo credit: Tom Smouse.
However, the two acts were far from being carbon copies. Grimes taught herself guitar upside down a la Elizabeth Cotten, so her fretting and strumming technique alone was distinctive and captivating. Her solo acoustic set, mainly on guitar with a short stint at the piano, sparkled with propulsive energy (thanks to her percussive guitar style) and wit (ask her about the, ahem, unusual inspiration for the song “Wendy Darling” sometime!).
Another striking similarity to King’s songwriting was the combination of darkly strong and confident lyrics with moments of pain and vulnerability, sometimes wrapped into a single song. “I could have you with one look / desperation is my favorite hook / I’m a hunter and my prey’s got me shook,” Grimes boasts in “Black Eyeliner,” then confesses in the chorus “but my eyes are burning raw / crying tears nobody else saw.”
After Grimes’ fun and thought-provoking set, Sarah King took the stage—and I mean, she took it by storm. Alternating between acoustic, electric and piano with occasional foot percussion, King blasted through all the songs on The Hour—including her instant-classic murder ballads “Nightstand” and “Not Worth the Whisky” and her powerful, stripped-down cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (not kidding, it’s amazing)—as well as a selection of earlier tunes and some tantalizing tastes of her upcoming album.
Sarah King. Photo credit: Tom Smouse.
Although many of her songs have deliciously dark imagery that can satisfy listeners in a macabre mood, there’s a deeper feminist message behind much of King’s music. Case in point: “Blame It on the Booze,” a single released last fall off her upcoming full-length album. King explained at the show that it was written with a specific person in mind, a woman she felt was in a potentially dangerous relationship. The chorus give an ominous warning:
Nothing more dangerous than a man who’s lost his shadow
He’s got nothing left to lose
The final repetition of the chorus shifts the lyrics to chillingly foreshadow how the story could play out:
Nothing more dangerous than a woman pushed to new lows
She’s got nothing left to lose
The real-life situation had a happy ending: Her friend has since left the man and uses the song as a conversation starter with other women she feels are in similar predicaments. We talk a lot about the power and necessity of music, but hearing such a tangent example of the impact of a single song gave me goosebumps.
There were plenty of light moments as well. King and Grimes displayed obvious camaraderie throughout the show (though we found out they’d been paired by the venue and only met in person that night). They watched one another’s performances avidly and interacted during both sets. Then, midway through King’s set, Grimes came up and joined King for a song. “Samantha told me she’d always wanted to be in a Spice Girls cover band,” King said, “and I told her that can happen tonight!” They proceeded to launch into an off-the-cuff, folk-ified rendition of “Say You’ll Be There.”
Samantha Grimes & Sarah King. Photo credit: Tom Smouse.
King ended the night with a few more songs, including a blistering rendition of “The Moth,” a sultry noirish murder ballad from an earlier album. It was an indelible show that went by way too fast, but hopefully it won’t be too long before she comes through the Twin Cities again.
Show gallery (all photos by Tom Smouse)
Carol Roth at Turf Club. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley!
