Kathleen Dunbar

Follow my Blog! 

I'd love to share my blog with you: Kathleen's Blog 
It's where I give my two cents, or maybe fifty, 
on life, art, music and more 
Lots of cool PHOTOS too! 
I share my musings with you in 
essays, poetry, lyrics, photos and music. 
Come join me!

Here I am:  San Francisco Singer-Songwriter. Rootsy, Americana, Bluesy. Touching, humorous, spellbinding storytelling. My songwriting brings you into the irony, the tragedy, and the possibilities of life! 

Where I Came From: Mix together a war and two difficult families, an expressive streak unexpressed on both sides. Along comes a child with a painfully felt heartfulness, a voice to use and no one to listen, tall Viking blood in a cocktail with wild Scots independence, a gift for storytelling, poetry, and music all poured into an always-tall girl living alone in a beautiful Ohio woods: Me. 

I have made poems since I could talk. I told the babysitter the bedtime stories (father bear smoked Pall Malls). As a child, up in the attic, I lipsynched old blues songs into the innards of an old coffee urn (a microphone you see) to scratchy 38s on an ancient record player. 

Fast forward through a lot of adventures: I went on a wilderness quest in the high desert with the intention of “finding my voice”—thinking this was about the voice for a novel I am writing. Instead, literally, I began to sing out there amongst the sagebrush—I wrote two songs which eventually found their way onto my first CD.

I came into this world with a voice, and it’s been my path to express it on all levels. Out of a beginning on the dark side of the fairy tale I found my way by following my intuition and my heart. After the desert quest, I found my first singing teacher. I sang at open mics acapella. Soon I found my awesome, magical producer and guitarist, Gawain Mathews, and began recording and performing with a band in earnest, as they say. 

My songs are about the range of feelings, choices and actions that we humans have swirling inside us, the ways we live our lives, and what happens in our hearts. What do we do with our pain? What do we do with our love? A heart can break down or break open—the difference may come down to small acts: the bravery to keep open, to offer a hand, to accept what’s offered; the sorrow of a missed opportunity; an action taken in anger; the transformation that happens when we open. And a good dose of humor to remind us to laugh right back into our hopefully opening hearts.