Patterns by Katy Pinke & Will Graefe

Patterns, the debut recording from the duo of NYC singer-songwriter Katy Pinke and guitarist Will Graefe, is a covers album: a first for either of them, though it often feels like an extension of each artist’s original work. Pinke’s songs seem to take flight from deep in her subconscious, alighting on one piercingly observed emotional truth and then another, guided in their darting paths by dreamlike chains of association and a subtle but persistent sense of mischievous play. Graefe, a prolific guitarist whose resume includes collaborations with Joan As Police Woman and Sam Wilkes as well as session work for stars like Kesha and Orville Peck, is an ideal foil: mining emotionally evocative chord voicings and inversions, equally adept at heavenly electronic textures and warmly earthbound acoustic picking, with exquisitely detailed tone and deep sensitivity to the subtle affective shifts in a given piece of music.

Before you even press play on Patterns, its tracklist announces the duo’s fearlessly idiosyncratic sensibility at work, setting timeless gems from the Beach Boys, Paul Simon, and Elliott Smith alongside hyper-contemporary dispatches from SZA, Frank Ocean, and Yung Lean. Given that breadth, it would not be unreasonable to expect a sort of mixtape, channel-surfing between vibes with not much more than a good time at stake. Instead, it is a statement unto itself, finding a common yearning humanity in its disparate source material. The songs, and the pair’s performances, share an air of heartache so deep it begins to feel strangely enriching, and maybe even kind of pleasant, hanging around like early evening mist, obscuring the surfaces of things and revealing their mysterious poetic depths. It is remarkable how personal and holistic the album feels: a throwback to a time when crafting your own auteurist vision from someone else’s songs wasn’t so unusual, like a modern take on Willie Nelson’s Stardust or Shirley Collins’ and Davy Graham’s Folk Roots, New Routes. (The latter, with its virtuosic acoustic guitarist and uncannily perceptive singer communing so thoroughly that they seem almost like a single performer, feels like a particularly apt forebear.)

Perhaps Patterns’ almost spooky sense of aesthetic unity also comes from the way Pinke and Graefe recorded it: live in the studio, over a single day, with virtually no overdubs or outside input save from that of engineer Eli Crews (Julie Byrne, Nels Cline). (Jake Sherman gets a well-earned exception for his show-stopping chromatic harmonica solo on Paul Simon’s “Night Game.”) The sound they got is both stark and expansive, the lack of clutter opening space for the delicacy of Graefe’s playing, so that the difference between his pulsating strums on Elliott Smith’s “Clementine” and his cyclical fingerpicking on SZA’s “Good Days” becomes as pronounced as if they were orchestrated with entirely different instruments. Pinke, whose formal training is in acting, uses each song as an opportunity to explore the psyche of the narrator alongside the contours of the melody. Her live performances often involve elaborate stagecraft—puppets, dancers, video projection—but she’s never sounded as actorly as she does here, as likely to stun you with a small shift in the emotional inflection of a particular line-reading as a heroic leap from one note to another.

They began the session by diving straight into the deep end: Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” whose alternating passages of bare need, somber reflection, and possibly misplaced optimism had a special resonance for Pinke during a post-breakup winter filled with unruly feelings. First takes aren’t often keepers, but this one was. Pinke recalls showing up to the studio, a little dazed and exhausted from a session for a different project the night before, and starting to sing before she’d even put on headphones to monitor her performance. The sense of raw presence, unmediated by calculations and second guesses, is audible in the spellbinding recording. She begins in a register just a notch above conversational, so that when she offers a “you never know” about the relationship’s prospects early on, you can imagine it delivered directly to the lover in question, and feel all the weight of its complexity: it sounds at once coolly tossed off and pitched red-hot into somebody’s retreating heart. By the end of the song’s six patiently intensifying minutes, the heat has fully taken over, Pinke’s voice rising to what you’re sure is the emotional apex of her performance, until it rises again.

Pinke has a long history of slotting unexpected covers into her live sets, but it was not until working with Graefe that she began performing entire sets of material she didn’t write. They had no grand design to make a record at first, but at some point realized that their duo performances were developing into something special and worth documenting. The duo chose the songs for an elusive combination of emotional forthrightness and musical strangeness, discarding those that didn’t quite fit the atmosphere they were cultivating. The Pet Sounds classic “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” with its still-singular blend of puppydog romantic sentiment and steely modernist harmony, feels like a signal inclusion, as do the two songs by Elliott Smith, whose reputation for raw confessional writing has never quite done justice to his craftiness as a composer.

For Pinke, singing covers is a way of accessing her own deep feelings, ones that might be hidden from her, or too thorny to go near, when she’s writing her own songs. She can inhabit the character of, say, Yung Lean, strung out and hallucinating while pining for love lost, and find something of herself, even if she’s never lived the life of a teenage Swedish rapper on a bender in Miami. (Her and Graefe’s take on his ballad “Agony,” perhaps the most left-field selection here, is essential listening even if you’re not indoctrinated into the Sad Boys cult; in their hands, you might mistake it for a lost cut from Songs of Leonard Cohen.) She hopes that Patterns can provide a similar reflective space for her listeners. “I want to give people a place where they can experience themselves and their emotions in a clear, simple way,” she says. “I hope people can feel whatever complicated things they’re feeling through listening to it, and feel connected to their own humanity, and maybe, forgive themselves.”
-Andy Cush, 2025