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  pat ON PAT, TIMBUK3 AND WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW.

   "My "official" recording career began in 1980 with the first Pat MacDonald & The Essentials album, Lowdown, released on 12" vinyl by Mountain Railroad Records, a regional indie headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. The closing song featured a cameo vocal by my girlfriend at the time, Barbara Kooyman, who also co-wrote the music. It was the album's only co-written song, ironically titled "Makin' It On My Own." A couple years later, with a growing musicality and greatly reduced surname, Barbara K joined The Essentials, playing fiddle and singing backup.

   In the next two years, we married, had a child, and recorded the EP, Essentialist Propaganda before splitting off to form the duo Timbuk3 and moving to Austin, Texas. Our live rhythm section consisted of homemade drum and bass tracks played on a boom box.

   That's when my "official" recording career took off. Our debut, Greetings From Timbuk3, contained a crowd-pleasing carryover from The Essentials days called "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades." It went to Billboard's top 20 and our little duo became an "overnight" success.

   From 1987 through 1995, Timbuk3 made lots more albums but never followed up the hit. During that time, my main job (which I absolutely loved) was to keep cranking out songs to make albums to fulfill recording contracts. We might have sustained the initial success longer if we'd toured more, but we enjoyed home life and home recording, investing the recording advances into equipment for our backyard studio. And that follow-up hit was always just a hook-laden chorus away.

   But I wasn't trying to write hits. And I wasn't trying to write a hit when I wrote the hit. I was just trying to write songs. Well, I knew I could write songs, but now I was trying to write albums, and enjoying my work, my "official" recording career.

   After Timbuk3's breakup I moved to Spain and was provided the means to produce several more "official" projects for the German label, Ulftone. Many European critics said they were my best, most cohesive work yet. Troubadour of Stomp, my first U.S. label release in ten years (and perhaps my last label release ever) (I'm hating labels at the moment) has been getting similar reactions. No longer judged on "hit potential," I've now been accepted as an "album oriented" artist............... December, 2007

 -patFAQs- By JON M. GILBERTSON
Special to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Jan. 17, 2008

Current Location: Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Alter ego: Purgatory Hill, who plays the "Purgatory Hill harp," a cigar-box guitar.

Most recent album: "Troubadour of Stomp," 2006

 

Sounds like: ""A trashy little band."

Describe your look: "Standard jaded rocker."

Sell yourself in 20 words or less: "I'm pretty honest in real life and in music, although that shouldn't be all that special. I don't care about money."

Favorite food on the road: "Salmon and asparagus."

Unofficial beverage: "Whiskey would be one. . . . And I drink Vitamin Water pretty regularly."

First gig: "I was 13, just out of eighth grade, and I had started a band with two brothers, Mike and Pat Smith, and it was the Rogues. We played a barbecue."

Worst gig: "There was a bar in Houston, when Timbuk3 was living there, around '85, and in this beer garden with Nazi graffiti in the restroom. We played the whole night to an empty room. We had fun with it, but it was the most ridiculous gig."

Biggest achievement: "Surviving this long and this far."

Where do you want to be in five years? "In a world that's not at war. In lieu of that, I want to still be in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and I want it to be a great creative center in northeastern Wisconsin. . . . And of course to keep evolving my own music and sound."

What's the greatest song ever written? " 'Rollin' and Tumblin' seems to be one of the songs at the heart of rock 'n' roll and blues."

 

 

B a r b a r a  K

Seeing the Future - The Vision of Barbara Kooyman

-from a biography on sparrowswheel.com-

   Barbara Kooyman can see the future. She peers into a time that today is mostly misty, lingering in the distance, and she understands with great clarity what she must do. She's been called to make the world a kinder and gentler one, one that does no harm and leaves plenty of room and resources for creativity. In her life she has scaled the musical heights, created hit songs, sold multitudes of records, and appeared on Saturday Night Live. Despite all of that, she knows her most important work has just begun.

 

   Though Timbuk3 is history, Barbara's future still burns bright. She continues to be a prominent and influential songwriter and performer in the Austin area, and she has launched a new project called Artists for Media Diversity, a vehicle with a powerful goal - enlisting talented recording artists and songwriters to establish a new source of support for public radio stations around the country. The inspiration came to her one day while she was walking in Germany.All of a sudden it hit me, she says with the joy that often accompanies great revelations. This will make a real difference when it takes off.

 

   Her idea has the added benefit of allowing talented recording artists who are often ignored by mainstream corporate    radio to have a legitimate chance to find an audience. Barbara explains the elegant and simple beauty of the idea: Artists  are heros, community radio wins, and the world gets to hear important messages that definitely deserve to be heard.

 

   And, there it is.

 

   The Future.

 

   Very bright. Now where did I put those shades?

                            2008 Sparrows Wheel

 

“Barbara Kooyman’s talents range so wide and so deep that trying to come to a full comprehension of them is as hard as trying to capture them in words. Over the years I’ve found that whenever I think that I might finally have a handle on Barbara’s gifts so that I might finally be able to create some kind of an inclusive critical snapshot, I almost always immediately realize that rather than coming to some kind of closure on her talents, I’ve actually just barely begun the voyage of discovering and appreciating them.

 

“A singer, songwriter, performer, musician and recording artist, who is also a mother, activist, visionary, innovator, entrepreneur and was a partner in Timbuk3, Kooyman is a fan, a believer, a nurturer and an advocate. Now if she only possessed one of those skills it would be amazing. It would be even more stunning if a whole section of those groupings were draped around her shoulders. But since each and every one of those words is appropriate to her, most being simply the opening idea for a whole essay on Barbara, then calling her just a wonderful person, gifted talent and strong performer is limiting rather than extolling.

“A gifted artist, a brilliant writer and a deep and wonderful human being, the rest of us have set sail beginning the long voyage of exploring, appreciating and coming to understand Barbara Kooyman in all her depth and fullness.”

~ Louis Black, Editor of The Austin Chronicle