live photos by Steph Port
“Look to your left, look to your right. We’re all friends.”
As the sun set the stage at Spoke Bicycle Café was awash in burnished gold. Singer-songwriter Julianna Zachariou paused for a moment during her opening set for a moment of reflection, acknowledging the year-plus long gap that made gatherings like this an impossibility as hesitant exuberance caught in everyone’s lungs like a deep breath waiting to be exhaled in a communal sigh of relief.
The atmosphere was thick with emotion. Social anxieties buzzed about as the diverse crowd worked together to navigate the nuances of group socialization, like lone sparrows coalescing into a giant flock that pulses in the sky as a singular unit, harmonizing in motion and celebration of togetherness. Fear and doubt evaporating as the forgotten pleasures of gathering with friends and strangers to experience something, anything, overcame the lingering shadow of the past year.
Zachariou and her band played a tight set of sunny, Nashville-meets-Laurel Canyon-with-a-sunburn tunes with a kind of effortless professionalism that almost made it possible to forget that it’d been over a year since performances like this were a regularity. Jangly guitar with just a hint of reverb washed over the crowd like a warm wave, fostering a lightness of being as the first sips of crisp beer opened easy smiles, faces turned toward the stage and feet seeming to hover just an inch above the concrete, bobbing heads on a slow serotonin swell. Ending with a rollicking rocker as the sun lowered beneath the horizon a sense of anticipation crackled about with electric tangibility.
The sun was completely set by the time Caroline Kingsbury took the stage. The warm tones of early evening replaced by purple and blue stage lights illuminating gauzy clouds of sugary cotton candy billowing from stage-side smoke machines. Kingsbury, center stage aflame in neon orange locks and dramatic mascara cut a figure halfway between Cyndi Lauper and Dani Miller, a pop songstress imbued with a natural presence and an emotional edge that immediately captivates.
“I didn’t really grow up listening to 80’s music, I grew up listening to The Killers. My brother showed me “Mr. Brightside” which completely changed my life,” says Kingsbury about the influences that helped bring her debut LP to life. And she’s right, Heaven’s Just A Flight truly isn’t a retro album. Although the record is bursting with Big 80s Energy the shimmering synths and electronic drumbeats power a thoroughly modern thesis on love and youth that’s very much built for today. Nostalgia still plays a key role, but Kingsbury isn’t pining for the pretty in pink days of John Hughes’ movies. A year lost to quarantine makes the normalcies of life before the pandemic feel as if those halcyon days lie decades in the past, rose-tinted and encrusted in glitter, but in reality closer to the present as the dull ache of a hangover the morning after the night of celebration spent ringing in the first hours of 2020. In this way the trappings of 80s pop and new wave fit the record like a glove, emphasizing the temporal distance with familiar sounds that make it ultimately easier to cope. Nothing is ever going to be entirely the same as it was before, but Kingsbury looks back in fondness before booking a flight to the future with newly found strength and unbridled optimism.
At sixteen songs and nearly an hour in length, Heaven’s Just A Flight is a substantial record, packed with concepts that range from the disorienting intoxication of unexpected love to the heartbreaking loss of a family member. The common through-point is Kingsbury’s strength of vision and personal perspective that ties each of these song-stories together through a lens of perception that stretches outward in all directions, inviting the listener inside these moments of personal (r)evolution with the reflective intimacy of re-discovering diary entries penned a lifetime ago. If anything, pandemic isolation allowed this album to marinate in time, absorbing new meanings that heighten the impact of the biggest emotional beats while adding delicate nuance to the connective tissue. Heaven’s Just A Flight may just be the perfect album for 2021, a look back on a year that wasn’t by celebrating moments from a past not so distant and custom tailored for performance.
Kingsbury maintained a vision for the whole affair, a vision that needed the pandemic to recede before becoming fully realized, “the composition was meant for live music. I wanted to play these songs and create a special atmosphere live around them.” Backed by a full band, Kingsbury’s heartfelt anthems of joy and loss lived up to that promise and blossomed into exceptionally realized expressions of personal emotion, shared and interpreted by an audience that bounced and danced to every song whether they’d heard it for the millionth time or the first. From the jittery vivacity of title track “Heaven’s Just A Flight” to the massive shout-along hook on “Fall In Love” there was barely a moment of reprieve from the torrential outpouring of happiness, performer and audience feeding off one another in an unending feedback loop of positivity.
Pausing between songs Kingsbury took a moment to exclaim “this is my first headlining show!” Mind boggling considering this was also her first performance in over a year. Performing again “was like seeing someone you haven’t seen in a very long time…awkward yet… jovial,” says Kingsbury describing the sensation of taking the stage again. “Did I actually perform before the pandemic? Did the pandemic really happen? It was also the first time I got on stage after my brother died…which definitely brought up some feelings. But I know my brother would have been like “shut the F*** up and perform, I love you.”
To go from existing in isolation and not performing directly into a headlining set in support of a debut full-length LP is an incredible accomplishment and testament not only to the skill of musicianship and the strength of the material, but also the sheer force of will necessary to just get up on stage. After so much time spent in a state of heightened emotional alertness, artist and audience were able to connect on a meaningful level, resulting in a communal catharsis as the first hesitant steps toward a return to normalcy broke for one beautiful evening into a joyous, full-tilt run.
Stream Heaven’s Just A Flight on Spotify and pre-order the album on vinyl from Bandcamp. Follow Caroline Kingsbury on Instagram.
