Beth Kille’s Sizzling Summer

Jul 04, 2023

Columnist and Contributing Writer

Beth Kille at a solo performance in 2022.

Some people take it easy in the summer, and then there's award-winning Madison singer-songwriter Beth Kille, who has a new album, gigs with two bands, and an in-demand camp teaching girls to rock and roll.

Oh, yes. And she's writing a book.

In truth, Kille has had a busy musical decade, since I first interviewed her in 2012 for a newspaper column.

Kille's manuscript — a how-to on songwriting with a little self-help slipped in — has her reflecting on those years.

"I’m like," she said when we spoke again last week, "how did all that happen?"

Where to start?

Perhaps with one of her bands, memorably named Gin, Chocolate & Bottle Rockets. They’ll play a show — pop-rock, edgy to fun — this Friday from 4-6 p.m. on the Memorial Union Terrace.

They were a duo at first, Kille and her pal, Shawndell Marks, calling themselves Gin and Chocolate after the two things Marks puts in her purse every February to brave the Wisconsin winter.

They added a third member, Jen Farley, when Farley showed up at a "Chick Singer Night" Kille was hosting and did a dynamite version of "Me and Bobby McGee," which included accidentally punching the guitar player — Kille — in the head during a frenzied moment of the song.

"She was horrified," Kille says, "but I actually kind of fell in love with her at that point — all that energy."

The group became Gin, Chocolate & Bottle Rockets. "If you’ve seen Jen perform," Kille says, "you’ll understand why ‘Bottle Rockets.’"

Kille's new album, "This Open Road," released late last month, is with her Americana-Rock Beth Kille Band, which she fronts on vocals and guitar and includes her husband, Tony Kille, on drums, Michael Tully on guitar and Michael Mood on bass.

There was a release party May 26 at the High Noon Saloon — "a blast," Kille says — and another set for June 17 at Appleton's Gibson Community Music Hall.

"We started recording the album in 2018," Kille says, but then endured a COVID hiatus.

The pandemic was a difficult time for performing musicians, and Kille was not immune.

She’d been playing music fulltime since about 2008, having grown up with it in Marinette (piano lessons at age 4) and continuing while she studied physical therapy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (she was drum major in the UW Marching Band).

Out of school, Kille had a physical therapy practice, but after accompanying Tony, who is a physician, when he took a one-year assignment in Houston in 2008, she decided to move music front and center. In Texas, Kille had the time to sharpen her songwriting and the gumption to take her guitar onto stages from Dallas to Austin (she still does some solo gigs).

Back home, Kille put out a solo album, "Ready." In 2010, she was named the Madison Area Music Association's Artist of the Year. The awards have kept coming.

The pandemic? "Devastating," she says. "It's interesting when your identity is tied to something and it gets stripped away. You have to do a lot of personal work."

Kille caught her breath, focused on family — she and Tony, married 26 years, have a 12-year-old son — and resolved in the future to "do the shows for the people I want to play for in the spaces I want to play."

Clearly, she still has a full musical plate. "But I feel like while I’m as busy as I was before, it's not as frantic, if that makes sense," she says.

With the worst of the pandemic behind them, the Beth Kille Band began recording again, and in January 2021, did a brief Midwest tour. During a casino show in Davenport, Iowa, Kille noticed her bandmate Michael Tully was in distress.

"He was getting more and more doubled over in pain," she says. Tully finished the show, but at 3 a.m. the following morning, he called Kille's hotel room. She took him to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy.

Other health issues brought further delay, but Kille says her friend is "alive and kicking and every bit the beast on the guitar he's ever been," and, as noted, "This Open Road" has just been released.

In mid-July, the immensely popular Girls Rock Camp that Kille co-founded and currently serves as music director begins with the first of three week-long sessions. Campgoers learn guitar, drums, keyboards, bass and vocals, and give a performance at the end of the week.

"We’re entering our 14th summer," Kille says. "We have three camps every summer and they usually fill within 45 minutes of us opening registration."

So, a full plate. A musical summer looms. And Shawndell Marks has eight months until she has to put gin and chocolate in her purse.

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Columnist and Contributing Writer

Doug Moe is Madison Magazine's award-winning columnist, long-time contributing writer and former editor. He writes Madison Magazine's monthly print column and semi-weekly award-winning blog, both called Doug Moe's Madison. He has also written numerous critically-acclaimed nonfiction books and thousands of newspaper columns and magazine articles over the past 40 years.

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