Katzin

Born in Alexandria, Virginia, Zion Battle spent his early childhood in Pasadena before moving to North Carolina for elementary school and then Manhattan in fifth grade. His debut album as Katzin, Buckaroo, weaves a lifetime of varied influences into a charged portrait of the transition between adolescence and adulthood. The record draws upon symbols of the mythologized American West – cowboys, horses, vast deserts, rolling plains, ancient rock formations – to trace that leap from childhood in all its unsteady shine.

“My dad laid the groundwork for my musical influences,” says Battle. “When I was in kindergarten and first grade, we would drive around listening to Coffeehouse Radio on SiriusXM. They played a lot of Tracy Chapman, David Gray, and Norah Jones: music that sounded the way coffee smells. A lot of those songwriters became my reference points when I started playing guitar and writing songs.”

Battle started guitar lessons in middle school. The more he learned, the more he sought out music he could play himself. “Eventually I got bored with the easygoing coffeehouse stuff and I discovered rock and roll: Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, songs that were fun to play,” he says. “And then I found Bruce Springsteen, whose album Nebraska is my favorite album of all time. I learned from that album what’s possible with storytelling and how to do a lot with a little.”

Nebraska‘s semi-fictionalized stories of small-town America cast long shadows over Buckaroo, which similarly plays in the middle ground between fact and fable. “I’m using my imagination, but I’m also pulling from real feelings,” Battle says of his songwriting practice. “A lot of the songs on this album illustrate past relationships from childhood: little fragments or things I learned about myself that I found poetic.”

The summer after he graduated from high school, Battle went to the California desert to break ground on Buckaroo. He had just spent most of the summer traveling through France and the Netherlands, and came back to the United States inspired to dig into what it might mean to be an American at this particular moment in the 21st century. What histories and mythologies cling to people born and raised in this infinitely complex country, and what responsibilities do we have to them? Buckaroo swirls around these heated questions like smoke from a campfire at dusk.

Together with collaborator and producer Max Morgen, whom he met at an NYU summer camp for young musicians, Battle drove to Joshua Tree for a week of intensive recording. “The idea was to go to the desert in the summer, when it was really hot, and be stuck inside and have to record,” he says. “By isolating ourselves, we were able to capture this raw creative energy. It feels like we made a love letter to our childhoods.”

Elegiac and smoldering with hope, Buckaroo is a perfect snapshot of a vivid time. “It’s a recording of a moment in adolescence as much as it’s a musical recording,” says Battle. “I really think in 30 years I’ll look back on it and maybe cry.”