Биография

Karen Black was boundless. An actor, singer, screenwriter, poet, and unyielding creative spirit, she was a prominent figure in the American New Wave, portraying a host of tender and labyrinthine women on screen. Her ability to submerge herself in each role marked her as a skilled character actor, one that translated into a real and imperfect person, not a polished emblem of Hollywood. In her best-suited and most vulnerable performances, she sang. Amid her meteoric rise, Black also wrote and recorded a host of original songs, many with two of the era’s most prestigious producers, Bones Howe and Elliot Mazer. Meticulously restored from the original tapes (including six of Howe’s recordings), Karen Black’s 'Dreaming of You (1971-1976)' gathers for the first time the best of her recordings: 15 tracks that are a holistic depiction of her dreamy, introspective and earnest musical identity. Karen Black and Cass McCombs met in 2008 through a mutual friend, when he was in the midst of tracking his 2009 album Catacombs. The pair became fast friends. They collaborated again on “Brighter!” from McCombs’ 2013 album Big Wheel and Others, and also wrote toward a solo album for Black. “She’d given me all of her poetry and I was trying to work them into some kind of meter that would work as songs,” McCombs says. They were able to record two of them before she died, “I Wish I Knew The Man I Thought You Were” and “Royal Jelly.”