Kath Bloom, an American singer and songwriter hailing from New Haven, Connecticut, first picked up the guitar during her teenage years. Early in the 1970s she worked with Bruce Neumann, yet her recording career truly began only after crossing paths in 1976 with avant-garde guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors. Together they cut five albums steeped in fragile, haunted folk and blues melodies; the partnership concluded in 1984 alongside the appearance of Restless Faithful Desperate and Moonlight. Bloom’s debut solo effort, Love Explosion, emerged as a self-released project in 1993, after which fifteen years passed before another album surfaced. She resumed issuing material with Terror in 2008, then delivered Pass Through Here in 2015 and, two years later, This Dream of Life on Mark Kozelek’s Caldo Verde imprint. Bye Bye These Are the Days arrived in 2020, succeeded in 2022 by the EP Long Way to Go Home.
Following the end of her work with Connors, Bloom ceased recording and encountered financial difficulty. As a single mother she devoted herself to her children and seldom performed beyond New Haven. In 1993 she again cut and privately issued Love Explosion, her final release for a decade and a half. Filmmaker Richard Linklater encountered her songs in the early 1990s and placed “Come Here” in the 1995 feature Before Sunrise. Heartened by that attention, Bloom began composing again and brought out Come Here: The Florida Years in 1999. The collection 1981-1984, a reissue of her Connors-era recordings, appeared next, trailed by Sing the Children Over in 2001, Kath Bloom and Loren MazzaCane Connors in 2002, and the 2005 retrospective Finally on Chapter Music.
Terror, issued in 2008, found Bloom performing both unaccompanied and alongside her Love at Work Band; the following year saw the tribute set Loving Takes This Course: A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom, which contained sixteen covers by contributors such as Bill Callahan, Laura Jean, Mark Kozelek, Josephine Foster, and Meg Baird plus a dozen archival selections. She joined Kozelek’s Caldo Verde roster for the 2010 album Thin Thin Line. After sporadic live appearances she remained quiet for two more years until the 2012 digital EP Here I Am, a five-track release on Caldo Verde. Although she surfaced on Jennifer Castle’s Pink City and This Frontier Needs Heroes’ The Future, Bloom concentrated on songwriting for the ensuing two years. In 2014 she recorded in California for the first time, resulting in Pass Through Here, which Chapter Music released in early 2015. Her nineteenth full-length, This Dream of Life, emerged in 2017 after five winters spent in Los Angeles and featured contributions from Avi Buffalo, Imaad Wasif, and Kozelek. Chapter Music reissued Restless Faithful Desperate in 2018, followed in 2019 by reissues of Moonlight and Sand in My Shoe.
Amid the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bloom issued Bye Bye These Are the Days in 2020; the album had been tracked the prior year with guitarist/vocalist David Shapiro and percussionist Flow Ness for Michael Cormier’s Dear Life Records. Confined by the crisis, she kept writing throughout quarantine. In September 2022 she released the EP Long Way to Go Home on C/Site Recordings.
