About
Karen Stern

Discerning music scholars have failed to explain the source of Karen's amazing wellspring of songwriting talent. This is not surprising since none of them have tried. It is known that her skill on fingerstyle guitar dates back to her lack of social success in a suburban New York area high school, where she stayed inside practicing while other girls compared hickies in the parking lot. What little fun Karen did have, however, tended to be in illustrious company, such as the time she threw up screwdrivers on humor writer Dave Barry's mom's lawn. Karen's social life improved slightly at Kenyon College, though not enough to prevent her from graduating with a B.A. in philosophy. She later recovered from terminal nerddom at a Zen monastery in the Catskills.

During a stint as an office temp in Manhattan Karen worked at Doubleday, Inc., where she ran into Jackie Onassis in the bathroom. Jackie told her she really ought to be out West weaving baskets, so Karen moved to San Francisco in 1982.

Karen has worked as a freelance writer and has read her humorous essays and poems on KUSP-FM Santa Cruz and published them in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. She received two letters from S.F. Chronicle Drive-In Movie Critic Joe Bob Briggs praising her parody newsletters and was mentioned in Briggs' newsletter 'We Are the Weird.' In 1996 she joined the Northern California Songwriters' Association and was chosen Best Performer from the Monterey Bay region. She has performed her songs at many coffeehouses in the Bay Area, including Berkeley's Freight and Salvage, and on KAZU-FM Pacific Grove, KPIG-FM and KKUP-FM Cupertino, where she did a brief stint as a guest host on Dave Stafford's Friday Folk-Off. Songs from Virgin Mirth have received FM airplay on KKUP, KZSC-Santa Cruz, KBAC-Seattle, and KUNM-Albuquerque. Karen received a phone call (she wasn't home) from Weird Al Yankovic praising an early tape of her songs. Since 2001 Karen has been working to raise awareness on issues of health and the 'wireless revolution' in Santa Cruz, CA.

Read Karen's memorable essays in the
Santa Cruz Sentinel

Two poems and 12 songs in styles from light jazz (Pantyhose Burglary) to blues (So Sensitive, Jesus Chrysler) to 'beatnik rap' (Big Feet, Jazzbeau) to doo wop (The First Six Months) and more. Lyrically, each song contains "richly nuanced layers of pith, hard to remove once you step in them" (--Prof. K. Stern) as in Pantyhose Burglary, a thinly veiled tirade against corporate greed, and Have You Ever Dated and My Boyfriend is a Jazzbeau, thinly veiled tirades against Stern's ex-boyfriends. Augmenting your musical enjoyment are the crystalline voice of Sylvia Herold of Cats 'n Jammers on TV Head, the sophisticated doo-wop harmonies of San Jose's hair-raisingly fabulous a cappella performers, The Aquanettas,on The First Six Months, the outlaw dobro of funky white boy Jeff 'Felonius' Smith, and more. There's something here for just about anyone...

Song samples can be heard on www.CDBaby.com/cd/karenstern