Finally

About the album

Kath Bloom is an American legend of folk, country, blues and avant-garde music. She has been making records since the late 70s, and has had her music featured in the movie Before Sunrise by Richard Linklater (starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), but from 1984 up until Finally released no new material of her own bar a few self-distributed cassettes and CD-Rs.

The daughter of world-renowned oboist Robert Bloom, Kath was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, where she trained as a cellist. However, she soon gave away formal musical education for the acoustic guitar, which she taught herself over long afternoons spent among the tombstones of her local cemetery. After a brief romance and musical collaboration with journeyman songwriter Bruce Neumann, Kath met avant-garde guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors in 1976, teaming up with him for a series of now highly sought-after recordings of traditional blues and folk songs and Bloom’s originals.

Some records were released in editions of as few as fifty, most no more than 200 copies, until the duo released their swansong Moonlight in 1984. Four of those albums have been reissued as double disc CDs by Chapter Music. Finally is a compilation of Kath Bloom’s heartbreaking, lovelorn and remarkably beautiful songs recorded since the early 90s. These are songs recorded on the fly in friends’ lounge rooms or cut-rate studios, but they reveal a mother-of-three songwriter as accomplished and affecting as any of her more acclaimed colleagues such as Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch or Hazel Dickens.