Forgotten Folk: Kathy Heideman

Only one obscure album… Until now?

I did not expect to be writing another Forgotten Folk piece so soon (literally the day after the first edition), but something spurred me on.

Kathy Heideman released a new song.

I know that because I got a notification from my Tidal app. Immediately curious, I clicked to see what it was.

The reason I was so immediately curious is because Kathy Heideman, the obscure folk singer, had previously only ever released a single album in the 70s. And this new song had cover art that looked like some garish Now That’s What I Call Music compilation from the mid-00s.

Oh, and Kathy Heideman died in 2022.

To the little extent that Heideman is known, it’s for the 70s folk album Move With Love. Released in 1976, in a very limited run by a private press called Country Flavour, Move With Love made exactly zero splash when it was released. If you can even really call it ‘released’, considering the number of copies made was so low.

The album was intended as little more than a songwriting demo… for the songwriter, Dia Joyce. Heideman was just hired to sing the songs. And even then, Heideman only got the gig because someone else couldn’t do it. That someone else was Juice Newton, who went on to have a wildly successful, Grammy-nominated career. Newton was originally asked to sing for Move With Love, but was busy so passed it on to her friend Heideman.

After the recording, the album essentially disappeared and no one involved really thought about it much.

Joyce, the songwriter, apparently cared so little for the album she destroyed the master tapes and any records she had left. Joyce, by the way, sounds like a fascinating figure. She ended up going on to live a gender-fluid life with her lesbian life partner and while she continued to work as a musician, she also created children’s toys and devoted much of her life to animal welfare and rescue. Joyce passed away in 2010.

The only reason anyone even knows the album exists at all is due to another relatively obscure group, a folk band called Vetiver. In 2008 they released an album of cover songs, including “Sleep A Million Years” off of Move With Love. And Andy Cabic, the leader of Vetiver, only knew of the song because he stumbled upon a vinyl copy of Move With Love in a San Francisco thrift store.

Pure serendipity.

The Vetiver album helped to generate enough interest that Move With Love would be re-released in 2013 by The Numero Group, who’d managed to make contact with Joyce before she passed in 2010.

Heideman, however, remained a mystery. People literally did not know who she was. No one had remained in contact with her and no one knew where she was. It wasn’t until 2019 that journalists finally tracked her down.

Heideman was shocked, but pleasantly surprised, to hear that the album had found a new audience, because she’d essentially forgot it existed. When she’d recorded Move With Love, Heideman was a single mother, needing the work. So she took the gig, sung the songs, and moved on with her life. She ended up moving to Utah, remarried, changed her name to Kat James, and continued to work as a gigging country and folk musician. Though she never included any of Joyce’s songs into her repertoire.

And really, from her perspective, why would she? Move With Love was just a gig she did years ago. All told, it was probably a few weeks of her life, if that.

It’s such a clear example of a bunch of working artists, just doing their thing, moving on, and in the process, almost accidentally creating something great. Of course, it’s not an accident. It never is. I’m sure both Heideman and Joyce (as well as the other artists involved) did their best, and tried to create something that people would love. But while it may have been a passion project for Joyce, it was most certainly just a job to Heideman.

Which goes against the popular ethos of what art even is. We often talk of the impassioned artist, driven to tell their story. A talent, divine inspired, pulled along by fate to create something great.

But more often than not, it’s just someone trying to pay the bills. Casablanca was famously created to be a B-movie. The Godfather was intended to be a schlocky gangster movie. Hell, in many ways, the Sistine Chapel was just a gig for Michelangelo.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Move With Love belongs on the same tier as any of those other titans of art. It’s smaller than that. It’s not an album that was ever going to define a genre or a generation. It’s just… good.

And it’s a perfect example of why I love a lot of older music. You can hear the humanity in it. Even if it was just a gig to them, you can still feel the passion for music. The inescapable artistry of craft.

It’s authentic. Organic. Real.

And in this day and age of the internet and smart phones and digitized everything, I have a real hunger for the real.

Which brings me back to Kathy Heideman’s new song, available on all streaming platforms now.

It’s called “Broken Promises”.

Which is just… fucking perfect.

Because I’m 99% sure it’s AI slop.

Yay!

I don’t even know what to say at this point.

AI is making headlines all over the place and for all sorts of reasons. And the music space is no different, with lots of noise being made about generative AI. There’s that AI country song that’s been “topping digital sales charts” (which is an almost pointless metric because how many people are actually buying digital music these days?) Or UK folk singer Emily Portman getting messages of praise for an album she didn’t create. Not to mention the countless AI covers of popular songs doing the rounds.

Very few people are out there singing the praises of AI music.

But even so, there’s something about this example that felt particularly gross.

Maybe it’s because Move With Love feels like it occupies such a small niche. Even though it’s been rediscovered and is certainly more popular than it ever was when it was first released, Kathy Heideman still ‘only’ gets 20k listeners a month, which in the grand scheme of things is not a lot. Which makes it hard to understand why some AI parasite would clamp onto her side.

Discovering Move With Love felt like a real treat to me. This small, forgotten piece of art. And though my discovery wasn’t quite as romantic as finding the vinyl in a thrift store (I just got it recommended to me by an algorithm), it was still a little gem of a discovery that felt special. Even though its origins were so relatively mundane and almost uninspiring — a songwriting demo, created by for-hire musicians then promptly forgotten about by all involved — it was still real and genuine. A snapshot of a moment in time, that had been rediscovered and loved by entirely new generations.

And now someone has just created the most bland AI slop-pop imaginable and posted it on Kathy Heideman’s streaming pages (it’s on both Tidal and Spotify, I don’t have anything else to check).

It’s so synthetic and fake and gross and weird.

But there it is. On the internet for anyone to listen to.

This is our world, currently. And, to be clear, I’m not even someone who’s particularly anti-AI. I think it’s fascinating technology that has the potential to completely change our societies, for better and worse.

But right now, we have… this. AI slop that no one wanted or asked for. People using AI to create brainrot fuel and misinformation, glomming on to our culture and poisoning the well with bullshit.

Not even deceased obscure folk singers are safe.

I’m going to go sit in the sun, put Move With Love on, and look at a tree.