Live and Local Spotlight: Katia Racine
Meet Katia Racine, X96’s Live and Local Spotlight artist for October…
Katia was born and raised in Maryland on a small farm outside of Baltimore. Her love affair with music began at a very young age with an obsession with the baby-grand piano that dominated two thirds of her parents’ tiny apartment. She can still remember the first day she sat down and triumphantly exclaimed “Dad, this sounds like it’s supposed to be something!” to which he replied “Well, that’s because it is something, darling.” And from that first arpeggio on, nothing filled her heart in quite the same way as music.
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In grade school she learned first to play the clarinet, then the piano, then the guitar. In high school, she and her sister, along with a ragtag band of misfits and hooligans, formed the Little House Collective – a group of musicians, actors and artists who would meet up in a small one room shack (the Little House) on their family farm to dance, sing, laugh and create into the wee hours of the night. In college, she performed with the band All These Elements while pursuing her degrees in Theater Performance and Religious Studies. Sad to do so, she left the band her senior year of college and took a long break from performing. During this period, with only a bicycle as transportation, she bought a ukulele so that she could bring an instrument everywhere she went.
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The following January, with no plan, no knowledge of the state, and no one else she knew, Katia moved to Utah for the love of a boy (it didn’t work out) and stayed for the love of the mountains (that’s going much better). She soon began performing again, making the rounds as a solo artist in Salt Lake City.
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Perhaps due to the collaborative nature of all the previous artistic endeavors that had filled her heart, she was never quite fulfilled playing on her own. One fateful winter night, at a party full of strangers, she found herself in the basement of a new house, flask of whiskey in one hand and a microphone in the other. Three hours, a few drinks, and countless dance moves later, she knew she had finally found a band of kindred spirits in Salt Lake. Deciding that that night was the most fun any of them had ever had, and it should be something they do all the time, she and the other basement musicians soon formed the band Pixie and The Partygrass Boys.
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These days, the Pixie can be found hooting and hollering and having almost inappropriate amounts of fun with the Partygrass Boys all around Utah, and she’s never been happier.
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Upcoming gigs include Oct 24th at the Bourbon House, Nov 6th at Undercurrent and Dec 11th at The Hogswallow.
You can follow her online here:
