Kim Moberg’s new album, All That Really Matters, scheduled for release this summer, surveys “the arc of human experience — loss, betrayal, melancholy,” she says. “Indigenous people have forever believed that music is medicine. It binds us together and shows us that we’re not alone.”
Music has certainly been healing for her — when her younger sister died of cancer in 2017, Moberg wrote “Angels Fly,” which is on an earlier album, Up Around the Bend. In the song, the sound of a finger-picked acoustic guitar tumbles gently over a steady drumbeat. Moberg sings without much ornamentation, in a simple and pure voice.
“I can get a lot of sad out through writing,” she says. The day she finished writing the song, she performed it at an open mic in Rhode Island. After the show, a man told her that he had lost his wife, and the song had moved him.
“Everybody wants to fill the house,” Moberg says, but it’s just as meaningful for her to play for five people who might connect with the music and tell her their stories. “That’s the driving force of what I do.”
Moberg grew up in a military household. She was born in Juneau, Alaska, where her mother’s family is of Alaskan Native Tlingit descent. Her father was a Coast Guardsman — because of his work, she spent her childhood and adolescence in New York, New Jersey, California, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts. “I went to 10 different schools in 12 years,” she says. One thing was constant: her love of music. “It was my friend,” she says, “wherever we moved.”
Her father was a fan of country music — Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Her mother was a classical pianist and acoustic guitarist — she listened to classical, jazz, and contemporary songs. When Moberg started learning the guitar at 14, it was the singer-songwriters of the 1970s like Carole King, Jackson Browne, and James Taylor who inspired her. She took guitar lessons from her mother for a year and then began to teach herself.
Despite her love of music, Moberg thought she’d never be a performer because of debilitating stage fright, she says. She entered a talent show in middle school, ready to sing Neil Diamond’s “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show.”
“When they called my name,” she says, “I couldn’t get out of my chair.” She continued to play just for herself but put aside professional aspirations and embarked on a two-decade-long career in finance, starting in Sacramento, Calif. and ending in Boston. Moberg now lives in Centerville.
She became a stay-at-home mom for her two daughters — “the best job of my whole life” — but when the girls got a little older, Moberg says, “I decided to do something for myself.” She returned to music. To overcome her stage fright, she began performing at open mics every week on the Cape. “It took a year and a few months to get over the fear,” she says. “It was terrifying.”
But exposure therapy worked. Transcending the fear was liberating, Moberg says. She released her first album, Above Ground, in 2017. When she was growing up, the only place she would play music was in the basement, she says. The album “celebrates the fact that I finally brought my music out of the basement and above ground.”
She’s since released two more albums: Up Around the Bend (2019) and The Seven Fires Prophecy Suite for Humanity (2023). The latter is a concept album, Moberg says, about an Anishinaabe legend in which seven prophets predict the future of humanity. The only way to survive as a species, according to the legend, is to learn to live together with respect for all people and the environment. The album has a mythical, expansive feel — much different from the personal stories and sentiment on All That Really Matters.
Moberg will perform all 11 songs from All That Really Matters at Eastham’s First Encounter Coffeehouse on Saturday, March 22. She’ll be joined by fiddler Heather Swanson, who she met eight years ago at the Sandwich Arts Alliance PorchFest.
When writing a song, Moberg starts on her acoustic guitar, with finger picking or chord progressions that sound good to her. Then she hums over her instrument. The lyrics come last. Her instrument is “like a Ouija board,” she says. “The songs come through the guitar.”
Moberg collaborated with other musicians for a few tracks. Her daughter Rachel sings the backing harmonies for “Kaleidoscope,” which is about “missing physical photographs,” Moberg says. “We used to take boxes of pictures and spread them out on the floor. We’d go through our memories with physical pieces of paper.” Her daughter’s high harmony adds a lushness to Moberg’s lower melody, their voices an audible representation of past and future.
“Good Women, Cheating Men” features a strong, syncopated drumbeat and a sultry guitar twang. It’s about exactly what the title suggests: Moberg’s experience of watching her female friends have their trust betrayed again and again. Moberg’s voice is low and husky — two women provide backing vocals, repeating the words “good women, cheating men,” and punctuating Moberg’s phrases with “oohs” and “ahs.”
The backup singers are Lydia Harrell, a voice teacher at Berklee College of Music, and Stephanie McKay, a soul singer-songwriter from New York City. All three women are part of the Folk Collective at Passim, a club based in Cambridge that “empowers, amplifies, and celebrates artists and voices who have historically shaped folk music and will continue to inspire its future,” according to the group’s website. “Folk music has always and will always encompass all different types of sounds, like rap and jazz,” Moberg says. “We go out into the community and try to spread that message.”
The title track of All That Really Matters is the last song on the album. It was born out of a realization: as Moberg looked through many of the bittersweet songs she’d written, she remembers thinking, “My goodness, this isn’t me,” she says. “I’m a very positive person.” The track opens with soft, flowing acoustic guitar and strings. Her experience of living on Cape Cod influenced the lyrics, she says. “Time moves like the tide,” she sings. “Rushes and subsides. We are both witness to its flow.” She repeats one phrase like a mantra: “All that really matters is love.”
Moberg’s album includes a couple of covers. One is Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” “My mom and I used to sing that song together when I was a young girl,” Moberg says. “I sing it differently now, because I’m a different person.” She sings almost conversationally, like she’s imparting wisdom to someone younger. And maybe she is — now she and Rachel sometimes sing the song together.
“Folk music, to me, is a living, breathing art form,” Moberg says. “You take a little bit from history, add a bit of yourself to it, and it continues generationally.”
Moberg produced the album with Jon Evans, who has a studio in Orleans. She asked him to add orchestration to her covers. Strings echo Moberg’s melody or provide a bold, cascading countermelody. Winds float over the strummed guitar. The orchestration “lifts the song and helps it travel,” Moberg says. “It makes that journey from past to present and hopefully into the future.”
Celebrating a New Album
The event: Singer-songwriter Kim Moberg with fiddler Heather Swanson
The time: Saturday, March 22, 7:30 to 10 p.m., doors at 7
The place: First Encounter Coffeehouse, 220 Samoset Rd., Eastham
The cost: $20 general admission at firstencounter.org
