The “Armenian Bjork” & writing songs on the john
Poet, musician, artist, Karin Tatoyan sings about her emotions
by Paul Chaderjian
HOLLYWIERD, Calif. - And a gray-haired Black man walking through the
patio of the Coffee Bean with a ghetto blaster on his right shoulder
grabs our attention. We all turn to look at the commotion. His stereo
is blaring an 80s pop tune from Madonna. The music is so loud, you
can't hear yourself think. For a second, on this fifth day of 2007, we
all flash back to 1983.
“Holiday. Celebrate,” echoes from the cafe; at the corner of Sunset and
Vine. “If we took a holiday, took some time to celebrate. Just one day
out of life. It would be, it would be so nice.”
Karin laughs. It's a sweet laugh. Wise laugh. An insightful one.
“How did you find out about me,” she asks me, the interviewee
interviewing the interviewer.
Oh, excuse me, dear Reporter readers. Let me introduce you to Karin
Tatoyan. Singer. Poetess. Musician. Performer. Artist. Armenian.
That's why you're reading this - to find out about her.
First, I have to tell her my story.
I found her searching for apartments on Craig's List, which is pretty
much the classified section from your local paper on the Internet. A
landlord advertising a one-bedroom had written that the neighbors in
his building were very nice people - Armenians and Iranians.
The reference to “Armenian” in the ad made me want to know what other
“Armenian” mentions there were on Craig's List. (Yes, it's an illness
I suffer from as well. We used to look at movie credits for our
surnames; now we use search engines.)
The first hit mentioning the keyword “Armenian” on Craig's List was a
hospice looking for an Armenian-speaking employee. Let's not go there
(literally and figuratively). The second hit was Karin Tatoyan looking
for a drummer.
“Armenian artist,” said the body of the want ad, and it led the reader
to her web page. There, four original songs play at the press of a
space bar, and the listener can't help but wonder who this person is.
Who is this self-described enigma of a person and artist?
Karin was born in Alabama. Her parents were from Damascus and Aleppo.
The couple and their three daughters lived in Alabama and then
Indiana, while her father trained and practiced medicine. Dr. Krikor
Tatoyan, who is still practicing, is also a popular medical talk show
host on Horizon TV in Southern California. His show is a sensation,
but that and how the couple had a fourth daughter after their move out
West is a whole other story.
So, Karin lives in Indiana for the first decade of her life. “I still
feel a total connection to it. I'm still an Indiana girl at heart,
running in the woods, cornfields. That's how I grew up. I didn't grow
up in the Armenian community. Dad did his residency in New York,
Baltimore, Indiana, and he moved here to L.A., because he wanted us to
be with other Armenians.”
What else would parents from Syria want? While they pursued their
studies and professions in the U.S., they would take their daughters
to Syria each summer. “We'd go for three months and spend time in the
city and at my family's hotel and restaurant called Jebel Ahrbyn,
which was in the mountains.”
This young family, nurturing its children in the Middle East and the
U.S., came from a history of music and theatre. Karin's grandfather
Bedros Knadjian was an actor and singer. Karin's great, great
grandfather Apkar was a talented puppeteer.
The muses that visited them have also been visiting Karin and her
older sister Sona, who is an actress and film producer. Sona will be
starring and producing “Celestina,” which was written by
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jose Rivera (Motorcycle Diaries, Jungle
Book, Diff'rent Strokes). Oh, yeah, Sona is married to Jose, but
that's yet another story. First, dear reader, we move forward with
Karin. She says she's very proud of her sister and considers her a
role model.
“We came out to L.A., and I went to Armenian school for two years,”
says Karin. “I have to say when I got here, it was very difficult. I
was a real 10-year-old. I was a tomboy, and I came out here, and it
was a real different world. [The Armenian kids] were so mean. They
were so snobby. It was all about the money in L.A. None of the kids
spoke Armenian. Here I was, oh my God, surprised that there were all
these other Armenians. The only other Armenians I knew were from Haleb
(Aleppo). I couldn't imagine the Armenian-ness of those two worlds
were so very different. It was just very hard for me. It was
difficult.”
The Alienation. Displacement. The stark contrasts between the values
of Armenians in Syria and the affluent and pampered children of
nuevo-riche Southern California Armenian suburbanites began to fuel
the hurricanes inside the young Karin that would later show their
might in the lyrics she would write and the music she would perform.
“I grew up with my dad and mom telling me that I could do anything,
you're going to do everything, you're a woman and you're equal,” says
Karin. Strengthened by her family's belief in her, and being told by
elementary school teachers that she was good at singing, Karin agreed
to perform in musical theater and studied the piano as did her
sisters. Confidence, intelligence and talent gave her a strong sense
of self early on in life.
“So, I was always very opinionated and outspoken,” she says. “When
people were putting others down and used derogatory terms, I was
standing up for them. People here just didn't get that, so I became
sort of like an outcast. I left Armenian school after two years and
went to a private American school.”
At Campbell Hall, the private Episcopal college preparatory day school
she attended, Karin realized how much she enjoyed singing. She was
involved in all of the musicals, but didn't like to put up with the
infantile politics of high school. She would spend hours playing the
piano and writing songs, even though she played doctor with her
friends and wanted to be a doctor like her father when she grew up.
“This sounds so cliche,” she says, “but I was singing to a bunch of
stuffed animals in my room. I had a baseball bat in my hand,
pretending it was guitar, listening to Ani DeFranco and pretending
like I was her and I was in front of people. At this point, I knew I
loved singing and realized that this is all I want to do with my
life.”
At 15, Karin picked up the guitar and taught herself how to play like
her dad had taught himself. She says she didn't take lessons and that
has helped her develop her own style. She did, however, take classical
piano lessons, learned how to play notes but hated to sit and practice
for hours each day.
After high school, Karin attended the private women's liberal arts
college called Mills College in northern California. “Because my
family and I were so tight,” she says, “because my sisters are my
best friends, I just couldn't be away from them.” So Karin moved back
and enrolled at California State University, Northridge. She's
studying sociology there and will be graduating this year. She says he
wanted to study sociology because she already knew music would be her
career and bliss.
Karin says she began composing music when she was 13, but she didn't
put lyrics to her music until she was around 18. “First I tried to put
poetry to my music,” she says, “but it was sort of an inorganic
process. Now, I think I just make the music and come up with the
lyrics as I go along. It's been an interesting push and pull process
with me not knowing what to do first, but now it's really easy.”
That easiness of how songs are born demonstrates itself when Karin
writes a song in 20 minutes. She says this song was about a
relationship that had ended and that her lyrics are generally about
human relationships and emotions. She has more than 30 original
compositions and spends a lot of time writing, rewriting, recomposing,
and reworking a song until she feels it's perfect.
“Whether they are love relationships, family relationships, or
friendships, I'm just an emotional being,” says Karin. “My music is an
extension of all the things I can never say or explain. I absorb what
the hell is around me, and I write about it. Some people write about
politics. That's what's really, really important to them. In my life,
I go through the world as an emotional thing, and I write about my
emotions, not necessarily my relationships, but whatever is important
to me at the time.”
Karin. An acoustic guitar. Maybe an electronic keyboard. And now a
piano and her voice. Raw emotions and talent on stage. Over the past
year, she has performed “a million” shows, she says. The number is
more realistically between 40 and 50 at such Hollywood hotspots as
Ghengis Cohen. She has mesmerized her audiences, and her myspace page
has played her songs more than 30,000 times to fans who can't get
enough of her original sound and lyrics.
Enter Joshua Fisher. He's Karin’s new manager and A&R developer. I
didn't know either, but A&R are the initials for artist and
repertoire. In the music industry, A&R help develop talent, find
artists a record label, and set them up with producers or other
musicians. Fisher says A&R developers generally work for record labels
and develop artists into what the artists need to be in order to get
their records out.
Why Karin? I ask him. Why did he pick her? “Karin is my first artist,”
he says, “and kind of the reason I'm doing this now. I've always
worked with music on some level. I just didn't know what I wanted to
do. I'm not a musician myself, unfortunately, or I would be in a band
trying to make it like she is.”
Fisher heard Karin for the first time 18 months ago when she was
performing at the Ghengis Cohen. “A friend of mine took me to see her,
and I had no idea who she was. I had no idea what to expect. But as
soon as we walked in there, I saw this beautiful girl on the stage,
but the passion that she had when she was singing her songs was
unbelievable. I looked around the room as she was singing, and you
could just see it on everybody's faces. They were so into what she was
doing. It was almost as if she had hypnotized them. They were
captivated.”
Her fans call her the Armenian Bjork. She is compared to Ani DeFranco
and Tori Amos. But how would she describe her sound, I ask her. “I was
just thinking about this question,” she says, “because I knew you were
going to ask me, and I was not going to know what to say, and I was
going to freak out.”
Fisher interjects. “Her music is more like this unique sound that's
not like anyone else's,” he says. “It's different, and I think that is
what's important. She definitely has people that have influenced her.
You can kind of tell that she might listen to Bjork a lot, but her
music is so different.”
“For me,” continues Karin, “it's always been that I have to be
different. I have to be different. But it's just like when you are
different, you are different. I get positive comments from people who
listen to rap music and make rap music. People who like my music are
people who listen to something different than what I do, but they like
my music too. They say, I wasn't going to listen, and I listened, and
you have so much emotion. It's all about the emotion. I feel like I
write about things, and I put into words what people have thought and
felt but didn't know how to express.”
Since connecting with Fisher, Karin's songs have been regularly
featured on 103.1 FM in Los Angeles. The station bills itself for
playing independent music, and the more requests the station has for
Karin's songs, the more airplay they're receive. Karin has also
appeared on Serj Tankian's “Axis of Justice” radio program on Southern
California's KPFK Radio.
Fisher and Karin have been working on her first album. Karin had an
option to lend her voice to a major music label, but they would choose
her songs and make her sing pop tunes. This would not be a good option
for someone who's got things to say. So Karin has signed a record deal
with StereoType Records. The company approached Karin and said they
would distribute her new album digitally.
“This label is only a stepping stone,” says Karin. “They're a very
small label, but they're going to help make my music more available
and get the word out. Hopefully, within the year, I'll have other
labels at my door wanting to sign me, and I'll keep moving up the
ladder. I also have a new addition to my live show. His name is Thomas
Greene. He's going to be playing drums and electronics up on stage
supporting my music. He's sort of a mad scientist.”
Fisher also plans to distribute Karin's first album through an
organization called the Indie Alliance. The group represents some
50`60,000 independent music stores, and if the Alliance likes a
musician's album, they make the CDs available across the nation.
Dear Reader, I guess the Craig's List ad worked for Karin. She has a
drummer and a manager, and you can listen to her songs online at
www.myspace.com/karintatoyan and write her. In five to ten years, Karin hopes that she can be an artist about whom Armenians in the community can say, “Here's a woman who's doing something artistic, powerful, and strong, and she is just like us, one of us, an Armenian, we are proud of her.”
** ver-cha-bess
spectacular event of laughing,
you are surprised,
you can't believe it.
you are the father,
you are the mother,
you are the author of
a particular event
marking
the absence of you crying
oh what a day
to celebrate
you don't find many
patience is running out
is slipping out
from under your feet
- Karin Tatoyan
** Stomach
You're the axe that broke the frozen sea in me
Epic if not for you, it was for me
Time will tell a story of its own
if i had my way i'd have my day
on repeat and rewalk that cobblestone
My stomach got smaller, your eyes got bigger
i'm trying to cut the bullshit but i haven't the right scissors,
And so, i blow, my nose, out of proportion
And i stand back, where i'm held back, watch the noise rush to my face
You're so perfect, yes you are
You're so pretty yes you are
I've let all this go to far
So i keep on talking to drown out the voices
Simply put i'm hiding, my tongues a contradiction
so i better put it in writing and keep on writing
And so, i blow, my nose, out of proportion
I stand back, where i'm held back, watch the noise rush to my face
I see your lips moving saying things to me me me
describing a life that will never be be be
You're the axe that broke right through my chest
Tore between my hearts life vest
I'm trying to stay afloat amongst the crashing waves of our love's mess
Here are my guts right here i spilled for you
so you could see, what it took for you
Here is my skin i peeled off for you, the muscles i built into
to have the strength to say, this is my goodbye to you
If i could i would but this is the best i could do
-Karin Tatoyan
by Paul Chaderjian
HOLLYWIERD, Calif. - And a gray-haired Black man walking through the
patio of the Coffee Bean with a ghetto blaster on his right shoulder
grabs our attention. We all turn to look at the commotion. His stereo
is blaring an 80s pop tune from Madonna. The music is so loud, you
can't hear yourself think. For a second, on this fifth day of 2007, we
all flash back to 1983.
“Holiday. Celebrate,” echoes from the cafe; at the corner of Sunset and
Vine. “If we took a holiday, took some time to celebrate. Just one day
out of life. It would be, it would be so nice.”
Karin laughs. It's a sweet laugh. Wise laugh. An insightful one.
“How did you find out about me,” she asks me, the interviewee
interviewing the interviewer.
Oh, excuse me, dear Reporter readers. Let me introduce you to Karin
Tatoyan. Singer. Poetess. Musician. Performer. Artist. Armenian.
That's why you're reading this - to find out about her.
First, I have to tell her my story.
I found her searching for apartments on Craig's List, which is pretty
much the classified section from your local paper on the Internet. A
landlord advertising a one-bedroom had written that the neighbors in
his building were very nice people - Armenians and Iranians.
The reference to “Armenian” in the ad made me want to know what other
“Armenian” mentions there were on Craig's List. (Yes, it's an illness
I suffer from as well. We used to look at movie credits for our
surnames; now we use search engines.)
The first hit mentioning the keyword “Armenian” on Craig's List was a
hospice looking for an Armenian-speaking employee. Let's not go there
(literally and figuratively). The second hit was Karin Tatoyan looking
for a drummer.
“Armenian artist,” said the body of the want ad, and it led the reader
to her web page. There, four original songs play at the press of a
space bar, and the listener can't help but wonder who this person is.
Who is this self-described enigma of a person and artist?
Karin was born in Alabama. Her parents were from Damascus and Aleppo.
The couple and their three daughters lived in Alabama and then
Indiana, while her father trained and practiced medicine. Dr. Krikor
Tatoyan, who is still practicing, is also a popular medical talk show
host on Horizon TV in Southern California. His show is a sensation,
but that and how the couple had a fourth daughter after their move out
West is a whole other story.
So, Karin lives in Indiana for the first decade of her life. “I still
feel a total connection to it. I'm still an Indiana girl at heart,
running in the woods, cornfields. That's how I grew up. I didn't grow
up in the Armenian community. Dad did his residency in New York,
Baltimore, Indiana, and he moved here to L.A., because he wanted us to
be with other Armenians.”
What else would parents from Syria want? While they pursued their
studies and professions in the U.S., they would take their daughters
to Syria each summer. “We'd go for three months and spend time in the
city and at my family's hotel and restaurant called Jebel Ahrbyn,
which was in the mountains.”
This young family, nurturing its children in the Middle East and the
U.S., came from a history of music and theatre. Karin's grandfather
Bedros Knadjian was an actor and singer. Karin's great, great
grandfather Apkar was a talented puppeteer.
The muses that visited them have also been visiting Karin and her
older sister Sona, who is an actress and film producer. Sona will be
starring and producing “Celestina,” which was written by
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jose Rivera (Motorcycle Diaries, Jungle
Book, Diff'rent Strokes). Oh, yeah, Sona is married to Jose, but
that's yet another story. First, dear reader, we move forward with
Karin. She says she's very proud of her sister and considers her a
role model.
“We came out to L.A., and I went to Armenian school for two years,”
says Karin. “I have to say when I got here, it was very difficult. I
was a real 10-year-old. I was a tomboy, and I came out here, and it
was a real different world. [The Armenian kids] were so mean. They
were so snobby. It was all about the money in L.A. None of the kids
spoke Armenian. Here I was, oh my God, surprised that there were all
these other Armenians. The only other Armenians I knew were from Haleb
(Aleppo). I couldn't imagine the Armenian-ness of those two worlds
were so very different. It was just very hard for me. It was
difficult.”
The Alienation. Displacement. The stark contrasts between the values
of Armenians in Syria and the affluent and pampered children of
nuevo-riche Southern California Armenian suburbanites began to fuel
the hurricanes inside the young Karin that would later show their
might in the lyrics she would write and the music she would perform.
“I grew up with my dad and mom telling me that I could do anything,
you're going to do everything, you're a woman and you're equal,” says
Karin. Strengthened by her family's belief in her, and being told by
elementary school teachers that she was good at singing, Karin agreed
to perform in musical theater and studied the piano as did her
sisters. Confidence, intelligence and talent gave her a strong sense
of self early on in life.
“So, I was always very opinionated and outspoken,” she says. “When
people were putting others down and used derogatory terms, I was
standing up for them. People here just didn't get that, so I became
sort of like an outcast. I left Armenian school after two years and
went to a private American school.”
At Campbell Hall, the private Episcopal college preparatory day school
she attended, Karin realized how much she enjoyed singing. She was
involved in all of the musicals, but didn't like to put up with the
infantile politics of high school. She would spend hours playing the
piano and writing songs, even though she played doctor with her
friends and wanted to be a doctor like her father when she grew up.
“This sounds so cliche,” she says, “but I was singing to a bunch of
stuffed animals in my room. I had a baseball bat in my hand,
pretending it was guitar, listening to Ani DeFranco and pretending
like I was her and I was in front of people. At this point, I knew I
loved singing and realized that this is all I want to do with my
life.”
At 15, Karin picked up the guitar and taught herself how to play like
her dad had taught himself. She says she didn't take lessons and that
has helped her develop her own style. She did, however, take classical
piano lessons, learned how to play notes but hated to sit and practice
for hours each day.
After high school, Karin attended the private women's liberal arts
college called Mills College in northern California. “Because my
family and I were so tight,” she says, “because my sisters are my
best friends, I just couldn't be away from them.” So Karin moved back
and enrolled at California State University, Northridge. She's
studying sociology there and will be graduating this year. She says he
wanted to study sociology because she already knew music would be her
career and bliss.
Karin says she began composing music when she was 13, but she didn't
put lyrics to her music until she was around 18. “First I tried to put
poetry to my music,” she says, “but it was sort of an inorganic
process. Now, I think I just make the music and come up with the
lyrics as I go along. It's been an interesting push and pull process
with me not knowing what to do first, but now it's really easy.”
That easiness of how songs are born demonstrates itself when Karin
writes a song in 20 minutes. She says this song was about a
relationship that had ended and that her lyrics are generally about
human relationships and emotions. She has more than 30 original
compositions and spends a lot of time writing, rewriting, recomposing,
and reworking a song until she feels it's perfect.
“Whether they are love relationships, family relationships, or
friendships, I'm just an emotional being,” says Karin. “My music is an
extension of all the things I can never say or explain. I absorb what
the hell is around me, and I write about it. Some people write about
politics. That's what's really, really important to them. In my life,
I go through the world as an emotional thing, and I write about my
emotions, not necessarily my relationships, but whatever is important
to me at the time.”
Karin. An acoustic guitar. Maybe an electronic keyboard. And now a
piano and her voice. Raw emotions and talent on stage. Over the past
year, she has performed “a million” shows, she says. The number is
more realistically between 40 and 50 at such Hollywood hotspots as
Ghengis Cohen. She has mesmerized her audiences, and her myspace page
has played her songs more than 30,000 times to fans who can't get
enough of her original sound and lyrics.
Enter Joshua Fisher. He's Karin’s new manager and A&R developer. I
didn't know either, but A&R are the initials for artist and
repertoire. In the music industry, A&R help develop talent, find
artists a record label, and set them up with producers or other
musicians. Fisher says A&R developers generally work for record labels
and develop artists into what the artists need to be in order to get
their records out.
Why Karin? I ask him. Why did he pick her? “Karin is my first artist,”
he says, “and kind of the reason I'm doing this now. I've always
worked with music on some level. I just didn't know what I wanted to
do. I'm not a musician myself, unfortunately, or I would be in a band
trying to make it like she is.”
Fisher heard Karin for the first time 18 months ago when she was
performing at the Ghengis Cohen. “A friend of mine took me to see her,
and I had no idea who she was. I had no idea what to expect. But as
soon as we walked in there, I saw this beautiful girl on the stage,
but the passion that she had when she was singing her songs was
unbelievable. I looked around the room as she was singing, and you
could just see it on everybody's faces. They were so into what she was
doing. It was almost as if she had hypnotized them. They were
captivated.”
Her fans call her the Armenian Bjork. She is compared to Ani DeFranco
and Tori Amos. But how would she describe her sound, I ask her. “I was
just thinking about this question,” she says, “because I knew you were
going to ask me, and I was not going to know what to say, and I was
going to freak out.”
Fisher interjects. “Her music is more like this unique sound that's
not like anyone else's,” he says. “It's different, and I think that is
what's important. She definitely has people that have influenced her.
You can kind of tell that she might listen to Bjork a lot, but her
music is so different.”
“For me,” continues Karin, “it's always been that I have to be
different. I have to be different. But it's just like when you are
different, you are different. I get positive comments from people who
listen to rap music and make rap music. People who like my music are
people who listen to something different than what I do, but they like
my music too. They say, I wasn't going to listen, and I listened, and
you have so much emotion. It's all about the emotion. I feel like I
write about things, and I put into words what people have thought and
felt but didn't know how to express.”
Since connecting with Fisher, Karin's songs have been regularly
featured on 103.1 FM in Los Angeles. The station bills itself for
playing independent music, and the more requests the station has for
Karin's songs, the more airplay they're receive. Karin has also
appeared on Serj Tankian's “Axis of Justice” radio program on Southern
California's KPFK Radio.
Fisher and Karin have been working on her first album. Karin had an
option to lend her voice to a major music label, but they would choose
her songs and make her sing pop tunes. This would not be a good option
for someone who's got things to say. So Karin has signed a record deal
with StereoType Records. The company approached Karin and said they
would distribute her new album digitally.
“This label is only a stepping stone,” says Karin. “They're a very
small label, but they're going to help make my music more available
and get the word out. Hopefully, within the year, I'll have other
labels at my door wanting to sign me, and I'll keep moving up the
ladder. I also have a new addition to my live show. His name is Thomas
Greene. He's going to be playing drums and electronics up on stage
supporting my music. He's sort of a mad scientist.”
Fisher also plans to distribute Karin's first album through an
organization called the Indie Alliance. The group represents some
50`60,000 independent music stores, and if the Alliance likes a
musician's album, they make the CDs available across the nation.
Dear Reader, I guess the Craig's List ad worked for Karin. She has a
drummer and a manager, and you can listen to her songs online at
www.myspace.com/karintatoyan and write her. In five to ten years, Karin hopes that she can be an artist about whom Armenians in the community can say, “Here's a woman who's doing something artistic, powerful, and strong, and she is just like us, one of us, an Armenian, we are proud of her.”
** ver-cha-bess
spectacular event of laughing,
you are surprised,
you can't believe it.
you are the father,
you are the mother,
you are the author of
a particular event
marking
the absence of you crying
oh what a day
to celebrate
you don't find many
patience is running out
is slipping out
from under your feet
- Karin Tatoyan
** Stomach
You're the axe that broke the frozen sea in me
Epic if not for you, it was for me
Time will tell a story of its own
if i had my way i'd have my day
on repeat and rewalk that cobblestone
My stomach got smaller, your eyes got bigger
i'm trying to cut the bullshit but i haven't the right scissors,
And so, i blow, my nose, out of proportion
And i stand back, where i'm held back, watch the noise rush to my face
You're so perfect, yes you are
You're so pretty yes you are
I've let all this go to far
So i keep on talking to drown out the voices
Simply put i'm hiding, my tongues a contradiction
so i better put it in writing and keep on writing
And so, i blow, my nose, out of proportion
I stand back, where i'm held back, watch the noise rush to my face
I see your lips moving saying things to me me me
describing a life that will never be be be
You're the axe that broke right through my chest
Tore between my hearts life vest
I'm trying to stay afloat amongst the crashing waves of our love's mess
Here are my guts right here i spilled for you
so you could see, what it took for you
Here is my skin i peeled off for you, the muscles i built into
to have the strength to say, this is my goodbye to you
If i could i would but this is the best i could do
-Karin Tatoyan
