Kristeen Young

I am sometimes asked, out of all the decades I've spent listening to music and going to gigs and being in the music business and all that, if I have a favorite artist. 

Yup, and here she is - Kristeen Young...

Kristeen has made 11 self-released albums since 1997, though I had never heard of her until 2018 when reading a passage in  'The Complete David Bowie' by Nicholas Pegg, and he discussed a song of her's called 'Saviour', on which DB and KY duetted. 

Here is the excerpt of Pegg's that got my undivided attention: 

Both instrumentally and vocally, Kristeen Young’s work bears a striking resemblance to the mighty Kate Bush at her most uncompromisingly intense, and nowhere more so than on this track, which recalls some of the more left-field offerings on The Dreaming. Bowie rises to the occasion with a committed, anguished vocal performance on a song which, like the rest of the album, is original, unapologetically avant-garde, and absolutely superb….

Oh yeah, this is the stuff of sweet dreams and nightmares alike.  'Dramatic', 'complex', 'intense', and 'feral' are just some adjectives that come to mind when attempting to describe her musical artistry.

While a few of her titles are for sale on her website...., most are not, but are available on streaming platforms and on BandCamp.



I've got hundreds of photos of Kristeen that I took at gigs between 2018 and 2022. These are some of them. Note that while this music is so good that she should be selling out 3500-seat theaters around the world, she ends up playing for a few dozen folks at tiny clubs (or at photography shows by nobodies like me), at least here in San Francisco. This might be the biggest travesty in the arts I have ever come across. 

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