Facilitating a good time at Karaoke with in house KJ Nora Knox
"I don't take bribes"
Footlight Presents @ the Windjammer is a community supported art space providing a platform for emerging artists in Ridgewood Queens since 2016. This is our Substack where we share industry related interviews, essays, & encourage discourse
I have had a love/hate relationship with karaoke since I was an eager ambitious tween with a strong belt and an unquenchable need for attention. I love singing. I have loved singing since I was 7 years old and took my first voice lesson to learn “Wind Beneath My Wings” to sing at my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. (*There was not a dry eye in the house.) Karaoke can be so cathartic and fun. I definitely shied away from it while I was in school and performing became work but I rediscovered my love for the true art that is winning over a crowd at Karaoke once I moved to NYC and it was all we did every weekend in my 20s.
Nora Knox is a multi-instrumentalist singer songwriter who has lived in Ridgewood since 2020. You’ve probably been served by Nora at a local cafe or seen her KILL IT on drums with her band Crush Fund. You will also find her every other Wednesday in our back room hosting the most kind, delightfully weird and niche Karaoke in the neighborhood.
I sat down with Nora over delicious coffee beverages at Cholita on Onderdonk and chatted about all things Ridgewood, independent tour booking and our mutual love for catharsis through song.
Photo by Nik Bauman
LBR: How long have you lived in Ridgewood?
NK: About 4 years. I've always lived off the M line in the Ridgewood area. It's very chill. Right now I'm in a very quiet corner off of Fresh Pond. It's cool that when I moved to the city, it was in this neighborhood, and I don't really have a plan to leave so…
LBR: and as long as you can hang on to an affordable apartment you're good.
NK: I have a sick deal with [a landlord] who inherited the house that she grew up in. This is the only property they own and her husband is a contractor so they renovated themselves. We go off the first lease vibes, and if, [they say] ‘oh this year, we need another $50 on the rent?’ I'm like, sure, yeah.
LBR: I mean, that's a normal amount of money. That's very old New York. It used to be like, $50 to 75 bucks a year max that people would raise your rent. I got priced out of my apartment last year by increasing my rent by $1000 a month.
NK: Wow
LBR: That was my home for 10 years. Then my landlord sold the building and as soon as the ink was dry, it was all of a sudden a management company. It was no longer the guy that bought the building. Someone's paying $2,900 a month right now to rent my old apartment, and all they did was paint it gentrifier gray and put in a washer dryer. I think they put in track lighting or something. It's like, okay, yeah, sure, but I was paying $1500 a year ago.
NK: Ok… that's worth a couple $100 more maybe?
LBR: It’s just so morally bankrupt to, in a housing crisis, intentionally remove affordable housing from the market.
NK: So nuts. And I guess, the rosemary playground corner is very family friendly, very central to the neighborhood.
LBR: yeah, it used to be suited to the neighborhood, and it was affordable. But then, since all the rents went up, you know, so did the prices at the grocery store. It feels very opportunistic and it just contributes to pricing people out. You start to notice these little incremental changes. I mean, you've been here for four years. What is your impression of what Ridgewood is like from when you moved here to what it is like now? I feel like in the last two years there has been a really big change.
NK: It has been a really big change. It was quiet. I would go to the Windjammer, with just me and my few friends there. It was 2020, people were worried about going out and stuff. There was outdoor seating so that was one of the few spots that I felt comfortable to go out. My first job in the neighborhood was at The Acre. (*RIP) In retrospect, I took for granted that they had $12 house cocktails. Which you can't find around now.
LBR: The first time I saw you do karaoke was at their closing party.
NK: Yes, yes. I was very insistent that we do karaoke.
LBR: That's when I knew whenever we want a Karaoke Host at Footlight, I know who to ask.
NK: I’m glad you saw my potential.
LBR: I did. You just loved it. You have to love karaoke to host it.
NK: I like facilitating a good time.
Photo by Nik Bauman
LBR: Let’s talk about touring a little bit. So how many tours have you done?
NK: [My current tour] is my third full tour with Crush Fund. And the last date of this tour is the 29th of September. The first tour we did started on September 29 a year ago.
LBR: Oh, wow, three tours in one calendar year. That's crazy.
NK: Since we started, till now, it's been like, two years of you know, gas pedal on the floor. That's just not sustainable for a band. We can't be doing that for three years, four years…
LBR: no, you will burn out. I can tell you from experience.
NK: Yes, we're all feeling it. Even going on this tour, we were running out of steam booking it. Other things in life were kind of taking priority, so it became a question of ‘is this a good idea?’ At some point, I was like, Okay, if we don't have these cities and this number of shows, we can't do this. Then we just managed to get over that line.
LBR: When do you start booking a tour?
NK: Ideally, six months out.
LBR: That’s smart. That’s what I want to hear.
NK: If you're booking a tour, you can't do every single city at once, and so you end up reaching out to certain cities later, or taking certain steps later on the process.
LBR: It’s like tetris.
NK: There's a couple cities where we had homies and bands that we could hit up, and we found people to play with, but could not get a response from a venue. I feel like venues are what I try to reach out to first.
LBR: When you reach out to venues, do you already have local support lined up?
NK: I would definitely find the artists you want to play with first and get a general vibe of if they're free or not. It can be hard, though. I go back and forth because if the venue doesn't have the date, then you're shit out of luck. So I want to be able to get a hold early on, and then you get the locals.
LBR: I book a lot of young touring acts that are new to touring, and that's always my recommendation to them. You have to come to the venue with, at least, maybe not secured, but four or five locals that you've already reached out to and that you've told them the time span in which you want to book the show. If the first email I get from a touring band is: ‘we want this date, or somewhere around this date, it’s at least three months in advance and we have these people that we know in the area that we could ask to play with us.’ I'm like, great, here's a hold immediately. No, back and forth. That's what I want to see. I always like to have the artists book the bills because I feel like then they're more interested in promoting it. There's more ownership.
NK: Absolutely. Yeah, [you need to] have motivated local [support]. Here’s the thing, we play probably 30% real venues, and the rest are houses or DIY spaces. The houses are totally different when it comes to booking, because that is a community space. Often they have a built in audience and a built in crew of people that they will ask. I almost always leave it to the house to find the locals. Most of the time it turned out amazing. I'm drawn to these kind of mid, small towns, because they often have a tight knit community. Especially in the queer community. Some of the best stuff we've played has been in tiny areas like Herndon, Virginia.
LBR: I love that. I mean, especially because your band is a trans femme band, which is amazing. That is something that some of these small towns probably don't see all the time and you're setting an example. You're showing younger kids that are maybe aspiring to do what you do or are maybe in the closet… You're showing them; We're a fucking band. We're touring. We are doing it ourselves, we do everything ourselves. It's just such a thing to aspire to for some people that unfortunately live in communities that maybe are not as supportive.
LBR: Ok, so you said you have fans in Detroit. You've never been there before. How do you promote these tours that you're booking?
NK: Yeah, Detroit was a person in particular who found us through Instagram, and has been following us with comments every once in a while; “No Detroit?” You have to rely on the local support and with the house shows, the house venue does the promoting itself. But if you're [playing] a real venue, then you really need friends in that town to swear by it, or you have to have been there before. So a lot of the main venues we hit are places we played on tour a year ago. When we did our first tour, we did it with someone from Minneapolis, from the Midwest. They had a much stronger pull there, and we had a stronger pull on the east coast. It was really beneficial, because then when we come back a year later, people remember us and come out for us again in these Midwestern towns. That's how we build it up. Going to New Towns is super, super hard. That's why I feel like houses are a good call for a new city.
LBR: Speaking of going to new towns, this is a tough question but I want to ask, as a trans femme band, how do you feel going into some of these areas of the country that maybe are not so welcoming and accepting? Have you ever been in a situation where you felt unsafe, and what do you do in that circumstance?
NK: Totally, yeah. So it was definitely eye opening. Our first ever tour we're driving from Milwaukee to Columbus and that's a long drive through Chicago traffic… and we're like, hours into this, and I'm hungover because I've had emotionally a bad night before, and then I was useless. I was like, Stop, I gotta puke in this McDonald's. (*Laughs) So okay, we're already in rough shape. It's raining, and we stop in Ohio to go pee at a rest stop. And she just gets chased out of the bathroom by a lady being like, ‘you don't belong here’. She just fucking books, and we're like, we gotta get out of here. I gotta take over driving… this sucks. She definitely was just like, Oh, we're not safe here. That changed the way that we navigate. If we could get a real DIY community to embrace us that's different. There were some places in Indiana that were interested in, but we're, like, we gotta go in the bathroom in twos, we're not gonna grab food at a local place even… where were we? It was Pittsburgh or something. We were in a diner and it's clear, they're not happy that we're there at all.
LBR: That's such a terrible feeling.
NK: Exactly, I was just like, everyone's getting bright service and they come to us like they're looking at question marks. So it definitely changed the way we navigate.
LBR: We've talked so much about touring because I used to be a tour booker,
NK: We could talk about touring all day.
LBR: I do want to talk a little about how you got into music. You play multiple instruments, correct?
NK: I got started playing acoustic guitar. I had lessons from a guy in the town. They would come to my house and show me how to play root chords and shit. At the same time in school they gave me the clarinet, and I never got very good at it. There were a lot of clarinet players, so I didn't really need to. (*pause for laughter) But, like, you know, playing with others and that camaraderie was developed early on. Right before high school, my friend gave me this big CD collection and mp3 collection [so I] could put it on [my] iPod.
LBR: How old were you?
NK: I was 14. and they had grunge, Sound Garden, Nirvana and White Stripes. I was like, Yo, this is sick. Before that my taste was shaped by Guitar Hero, (*more laughter) Legit, because I got it from my older sisters, so I was playing it when I was really young, and just got so into it. I liked playing the drum one and that's basically where I learned how to start drumming.
LBR: I'm terrible at drums. That's the one instrument I've never been able to come close to conquering.
NK: It always was appealing to me. I had a bunch of friends in high school who were percussionists. Every day after school I'd go to whatever music club I was a part of, which was as many as possible, and then I would just hang out in the music building until it was time to go. And I'm like, if there's no one around, I'll get behind the kit and like, putts around. I sucked so much, but you do that enough times you stop sucking. You do have to struggle for a little bit. I really didn't get into writing my own stuff or performing my own stuff until college, [at Purchase] where there was actually a DIY scene and felt very inspired to dig into songwriting.
LBR: Purchase is a really cool environment for that.
NK: I basically minored in indie rock.
LBR: When was the first time you did karaoke, and what did you love about it?
NK: First time, I think my parents had realized the American dream and took us on a four day cruise. It must have been before I was in high school, yeah, right on that cusp.
LBR: No way, it was the same for me, middle school family vacation.
NK: They had all these activities for tweens and teenagers, and there was a karaoke night and I did “Don't You Forget About Me”. It was a song that they had that I knew, and I was like, ‘I love this attention I’m getting right now’. Karaoke changed my relationship to both popular music and performing. When it's popular and other people are into it and singing along with you, you notice new things about songs and you appreciate things in songs that you did not appreciate earlier. My best example for that is Evanescence. They are an awesome, awesome band, and an awesome karaoke band. I only really appreciated that when you know people are singing, “Wake me up inside”, and then the whole room echoes “Can't wake up”. The way it pumps everyone up is so cool.
LBR: I love the way you host karaoke and curate, you really lean into the more niche song choices. If you go to any karaoke spot they probably won’t have Mitski.
NK: Youtube is awesome. Some of these youtube channels even take requests. I really do like to embrace the weirdness.
Thank you Nora! <3
Embrace the weirdness every other Wednesday from 8:30 till late
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