
Palehound
Pop
Upcoming Events
Tuesday, February 27

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
State Theatre
Monday, February 26 at 8 pm
Guest List
Tickets
Tables
Wednesday, February 28

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
Kodak Center
Tuesday, February 27 at 7:30 pm
Guest List
Tickets
Tables
Friday, March 1

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
The Salt Shed
Thursday, February 29 at 8 pm
Guest List
Tickets
Tables
Saturday, March 2

SOLD OUT - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
The Salt Shed
Friday, March 1 at 8 pm
Guest List
Tickets
Tables
Sunday, March 3

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
Palace Theatre
Saturday, March 2 at 8 pm
Guest List
Tickets
Tables
Monday, March 4

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
Palace Theatre
Sunday, March 3 at 8 pm
Guest List
Tickets
Tables
Friday, March 29

Sleater-Kinney: Little Rope Tour
The Wiltern Theatre
Thursday, March 28 at 7 pm
Guest List
Tickets
Tables
Saturday, March 30

Sleater-Kinney
Belasco
Friday, March 29 at 7 pm
Guest List
Tickets
Tables
Details
Spotify Top Track
Description
On Palehound's first album, singer and guitarist Ellen Kempner wrote about other people from a distance. Written while she was still "in a bubble" at college, the record's breakthrough single "Healthier Folk" saw her "watching cuties hit the half-pipe." On "Cinnamon," she was "peeking at the centerfolds." That record, Dry Food, was a product of spending a lot of time alone.
"I wrote it when I was really isolating myself," Kempner admits. "I was just very depressed and very socially anxious and in a weird social environment where I didn't feel particularly comfortable."
Kempner’s talking to me on the phone from a warehouse in Somerville, MA, where she works packing remainders for the nearby Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. Since writing Dry Food, she’s dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College, moved to Boston, and formed the kinds of friendships she found herself missing at school. Palehound’s second album, A Place I’ll Always Go, is correspondingly populated with new characters — not people Kempner sees from afar, but people she holds closely.
One of those characters haunts the new album as the subject of the tender eulogy “If You Met Her.” Lily, one of the first people Kempner befriended after moving to Boston, appears as a “friendly ghost,” both in the lyrics of the song and in the places around the city where she and Kempner used to spend time together. "That's just one of those things that when it happens to you, you feel like you're in someone else's life,” Kempner says of Lily's passing. Though she could feel the tragedy creeping up — two of her high school classmates died unexpectedly not long before her friend did, and she reads their deaths now as a kind of foreshadowing — it still devastated her in a way she’d never felt before.
Top Palehound Songs of All Time