The first thing you sense about Karina Rykman on stage is that she’s clearly enjoying herself more than anyone else in the room. Whether she’s playing her own material with her band, sitting in with “Late Night with Seth Meyers” house band, jumping on stage with My Morning Jacket or rocking out at Zabar’s (the Manhattan institution sells her signature selection, called a Babkarina), she’s smiling, bopping around and looks like someone who won a contest to be in her own life.
The foodie side of the New York bassist, singer and songwriter is equally effusive. Who else would write a song called “Seafood Towers” for her second album, “Late Checkout,” released last week?
“There’s a famous song called ‘Espresso,’ and I was like, I am not going to let that happen with my precious seafood towers,” Rykman says during a video chat, referring to the ubiquitous Sabrina Carpenter hit. “So I just wrote the most ridiculous song possible before she could about one of my favorite things other than espresso. And when the refrain is ‘Don’t ever buy me flowers/ All I want are seafood towers,’ what’s left to say?”
Ahead of last week’s album release show at Webster Hall, Rykman also dished about recording the album at two well-known but very different studios, the balance between her jamming live shows and the more structured TV gigs and her ongoing collaborative relationship with My Morning Jacket.
Is there a theme that connects the songs on “Late Checkout”?
I think more than a central theme that connects them, it was more the idea that I wanted this album to really feel like an album. I wanted it to feel like a band. I wanted it to be both eclectic and cohesive at the same time, more so than my last record, I would say. So I think regardless of underlying themes, that was more what I went into this thinking. I wanted it to feel like us. I wanted it to feel like a band. I wanted it to feel more organic and more like me and my dudes playing together with the concise sort of three-and-a-half, 4.5-minute-long tunes that could hopefully be enjoyed by anyone and not just people on 11 hits of acid.
Could you tell me about “Shoegaze Summer,” the final single you put out before the album release?
Unlike some of the other ones, that one came from a completely organic jam. Just me, Adam November on guitar and Chris Corsico on drums, just full-blown jamming in a barn on Adam’s property upstate. The entire tune was written instrumentally and quite literally hasn’t really changed all that much from that very day without a single vocalization from me that day, you know? But we went home with the ‘Shoegaze Summer’ that we now know and love, if you took it and made it completely instrumental, that is what we left with that day. And then I wrote the melody and then I wrote the words after. The tune itself, the title, we just called it ‘Shoegaze Summer’ that day from day one. And of course, the lyrics don’t have much to do with that, but it was a cool title, regardless of this tune being shoegaze or not, it kind of has elements of it just because there’s a lot of pedal play. But the title stuck and lyrically it’s sort of a self-empowerment anthem in a funny way.
If you strip it all away, I, the writer, if you will, go between pumping themselves up and navigating the world. It goes from you talking to someone else and then you talking to yourself kind of back and forth. You know, it’s interesting. I love that tune. It kind of exploded out of nowhere and in almost complete form, quickly, and then lyrically it came quickly too. I’m really excited about it. It’s one of the tunes that we’ve been playing the longest out of all these songs on the record, so it’s been cool to see how it’s developed trying to just hit the right notes all the time.
You recorded at DFA, the Brooklyn studio run by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, and The Barn, the studio in Vermont run by Trey Anastasio of Phish. How did these two spaces affect the album?
I mean, it was such a surreal experience to lock in at The Barn in rural Vermont for 14 days. We didn’t leave the premises. One time we had Charlie – shout-out our tour manager, Charlie Horn — being the only person coming and going from the property at all, and he was the one who bought us food and cooked most of the meals and kept the place in functioning order while we were completely focused on the music, which was amazing. So obviously to get to work on music in such a storied place where so many of my favorite records and so many of my favorite songs were recorded is insane. And it has this kind of rustic feel. It was erected in the ‘90s, so it has that sort of vibe, and it has a very Phish, very Vermont, cozy, rustic past vibe, whereas once we got to DFA, it was like being shot right into the future in slick New York City, so it was funny to to live just all together at a barn for 14 days and then bam, you’re right back in the city, which is good because I wanted to have a little bit of both, you know what I mean? I’m born and raised in New York City, I’m a city kid through and through, and that’s more my style and just more what I’m used to. But it was amazing to just have no distractions, no street sounds, no people, no anything, but just literally us, four walls and the music. And then it was cool to just be shot into the future at DFA and have insane state-of-the art toys. James Murphy is an insane collector of synthesizers and vintage pianos and all these things, as I’m sure you can imagine, and it was so great to get to play with all those and lay down all of the post-production there. We would take synth sounds and cook them quote-unquote through this vintage Roland processor. It was so cool. So I think having a little bit of both influenced the sound of this album in immeasurable ways. And nothing felt forced. It was all correct. It felt like everything was suiting the vibe that it had to.
You’ve played in some more structured situations compared to your own live shows, such as backing Julia Michaels and playing in Seth Meyers’ band. What has that been like for you?
Oh, I’ve learned so much from doing things like that. I’ve learned from every musical experience that I’ve had, be it two hours of unadulterated improv with my heroes versus playing on Seth Meyers or on the Today or on America’s Got Talent, like more of these straightlaced NBC gigs and whatnot. Everything goes into my bag of tricks and informs everything else, and I’m so grateful to have had such informative musical experiences that run the gamut and are all over the spectrum.
Doing live TV, that’s sort of an adrenaline rush that you can’t even prepare yourself for because it’s all about being incredibly on point for a very short amount of time. You’re basically like, all right, here we go. And we had guest walk-on songs and going to commercial break, coming out of commercial break, and you just have to basically have all of your wits about you such that when the producer says, all right, five, four, three, two, one, now you’re on, you have to look good, you have to sound good, and you have to start together and end together. It sounds like nothing, but it’s very stressful when Larry David is sitting on the couch in front of you, and you just want to make sure everything is on point while you’re super starstruck and Tracy Morgan’s trying to buy your guitar off the air.
I love TV. I love show business, shit like that. So what I do is much more feral and you want to call it loose or I can march to the beat of my own drum with my music, but doing that and having to show up, be super on point, while bringing an air of humor, I think, to the set every day was super fun.
I saw you sit in with My Morning Jacket last October, and you just played with them again in August. How did you initially connect with them?
I got to tour with those guys, the summer of 2024 opened for them a whole bunch, and from the second show I was already sitting in with them. After that tour, we were both scheduled on the same festival, it was called Rose on the River in Chicago, and they were playing the night before me. They invited me to sit in with them at this festival, and I was like, holy shit, this just keeps going, this is a dream come true for me, you know? And that night I played three songs with them. That night I played “Touch Me, I’m Going to Scream, Part Two, “Louie Louie” and closed the festival out with “One Big Holiday,” which I remember being an 11-year-old kid, on my skateboard with a green iPod Mini blasting “One Big Holiday.” It’s one of my favorite, formative tunes in my life. So that was insane. And I have now sat in with My Morning Jacket seven times if I’m not mistaken.
I remember when I got that email from my agents saying that they wanted me to open for them in 2024. I literally screamed, I remember where I was, I dropped my phone, I lost my shit. Like I’m a super geek-out fan. And to call them friends and mentors and pals now is just so surreal.
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