Kara Hesse Puts “Vanity” Front and Center on Devil & the Dove,
Confronting Beauty, Biology and the Value We Attach to Appearance
“It’s as if Bonnie Raitt, Sia, & Janis Joplin had a baby.”
— Pulse Music Television, San Francisco
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Before a girl ever learns to question the way she looks, she watches the women she loves do it first. On “Vanity,” the focus track from Nashville-based Americana/rock artist Kara Hesse’s album Devil & the Dove, Hesse returns to one of her earliest memories: her mother’s vanity—the embroidered seat, the scent of Chanel perfume hanging in the room, the careful makeup, and the magazine pages showing her what beautiful was supposed to look like. She remembers sitting there, taking in every move, too young to understand that she wasn’t only watching her mother get ready. She was watching a woman measure herself against an image.
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Then there were her grandmother’s eyes. No mirror. No magazine. Just the quiet certainty of a woman who seemed to understand something entirely different: a face will change, beauty will fade, but there are parts of a woman no reflection will ever be able to measure.
Today, the magazine has become a screen. The mirror has become a camera. Comparison follows us everywhere. But the little girl is still watching. And what we teach her to see when she looks at herself may stay with her for the rest of her life. “With the rise of social media and the attachment of values to physical attributes, there is just so much more to life than the skin we’re in,” Hesse says. But Hesse isn’t interested in pretending physical attraction doesn’t exist. “Your senses don’t lie. Attraction is a biological reality,” Hesse says.
Rather than condemning the woman sitting at the mirror or dismissing attraction altogether, “Vanity” questions what happens when appearance becomes currency, when something biological becomes something cultural, and the way a woman looks begins carrying expectations about who she is and what she’s worth.
For Hesse, it was a subject she had wanted to put into words for a long time. “Vanity” was born during her first Nashville co-write with Greg Wilson, a songwriter Hesse had seen around town and knew she wanted to work with. The two later discovered an unlikely coincidence: they share the same birthday.
“My first co-write in Nashville was with Greg Wilson, who I spotted from a writer’s round and just had to write with,” Hesse says. “It was a very cathartic experience. I found myself quite emotional after the session, as I’d been feeling the need to write about these issues for a long time and felt I may have landed on something powerful.” That emotional investment followed the song into the studio. “Vanity” became the last song completed for Devil & the Dove and one of the most challenging tracks to get right. The final recording features drummer Charlie Morgan, whose credits include Elton John and Olivia Newton-John.
The song’s long road to completion mirrors the album around it. Devil & the Dove was five years in the making, with recording spanning Seattle and Nashville before Hesse worked with Nashville engineer Pat Lassiter to bring the pieces together. For Hesse, finishing the project represented what she calls an “absolute rebirth and reset” after years of change, pain, letting go and starting over.
“If I was to bury this album in the earth and somebody dug it up, they could get a pretty good glimpse into this particular time in my life,” Hesse says. “The songs began to reveal the hard truths about what I was actually going through, what I’d been holding onto, and what I needed to let go of in order to find happiness and live a full life. Somehow, I found myself healing in the process. Devil & the Dove represents such a period of growth for me. It taught me to listen to my
gut, not back down from my vision, and always make it a priority to serve the song. Who I was at the start of this record does not have the same backbone as the producer I’ve become today, and it feels really good to be proud of that.”
Hesse’s career has rarely fit neatly into one lane. Her Americana/rock sound has landed music on CBS’ Scorpion and DirecTV’s You Me Her and put her on stages alongside Steve Miller Band, B.B. King, Al Green and Buddy Guy.
Hesse will bring Devil & the Dove to the stage in Nashville just two days after putting the spotlight on “Vanity.”
For an album Hesse describes as “more lived in, less safe, more vulnerable,” “Vanity” gets directly to the heart of that evolution. It recognizes attraction without worshipping it, beauty without assigning it worth, and the mirror without allowing it the final word.
Because after generations of women being told to look closer, Hesse is asking us to finally look beyond it. The mirror can show you exactly what you look like. It still can’t tell you a damn thing about what you’re worth.
For more information on Kara Hesse and to follow her, please visit Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Website, Roadworn, and Spotify.