The Mule by Kristi Martel

Then I talked to people (especially my partner, Littlebird, who helped me create the track listing and started creating a mule cartoon for me, for the album...) about the idea and got enough feedback to create this here "theme" album. It's been a long, long time coming. I wrote most of these songs before I recorded my previous album, "brave enough," but chose not to put these songs on that album because these songs are heavier and required a more weighty recording process. The songwriting spans ten years - ten years of stories I've carried. The songs tend to explore the bounds of relationships and identities - interior, romantic, social, public. Relatives, friends, lovers, street harassers - leave their imprints on me and show up in my texts. I am just trying to get the word out. I am just trying to get free by telling. I hope you can feel all the beauty, emotion, love, care, power, fight, struggle, commonality, and truth. I hope that we can each be brave enough to break our silences and let our stories take flight, so that we may live fully and well on the ground. Let me set them free. Blessed be.

-km

"...love emanates from every note." - Vienna Teng

"Incomparable!" - Utah Phillips

"Damn!" - Cesca Waterfield

Voted RI’s Best Female Alt-Rock Vocalist in 2006 by Motif Magazine, avant-soul piano diva Kristi Martel grew up in New England and left in 1990 to earn an ASCAP grant and two music degrees (Bard and Mills College) in NY and CA before returning home to RI in 2003. The visionary soulsinger choreographed performance art and composed vocal music to tell stories about relationships, cultural identity, body image, and body memory before beginning her touring and recording career in 2000. "The Mule" is a project long in the making that seems to integrate her through-composed, performance art, and soulsinger selves into one work.

A finalist in many of the top international songwriting competitions, Kristi's piano playing combines her love of blues dissonance and syncopation with her classical training. Her voice is at once sweet and bitter, able to leap and soar, whisper and rattle, expressive of any emotion she chooses and fluid throughout her 4-octave range. She is visionary in her lyrics and composition, writing her prayers for solace and quirky relationship narratives in the same breath. Her sweet presence and fearless songwriting endear audiences nationwide.

Through Sealed Lip Records, Kristi has released five CDs, most recently the homespun limited edition demos for her forthcoming studio album, Ravengirl. “Ravengirl” is Kristi’s goofy joke superhero name for herself, her recognition of the crazy blessing it is that she felt joy everyday, amidst the profound grief, after her former life partner’s suicide in 2003. The album is full up with that joy, with the healing and transformation Kristi has undergone to be singing still so powerfully today.

discography:

Ravengirl (LP 2006)

Quaint & Curious Ravendemos (LP 2005)

The Mule (LP 2004)

bound (single 2003)

brave enough (LP 2001)

give me a little... (EP 2000)

Average Customer Review: