Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis
Makeup by Gina Betteli
Avante-garde classical composer? Freak-folk singer-songwriter? Postmodern jazz interloper? Recently eschewing electronic instruments for a banjo, Eaton’s music is colored by her eclectic musical expertise, spanning the Renaissance lute, 20th century post-tonal harmony, American minimalism and frontier songs of the American west. Her “disconcertingly lovely” (Seattle Weekly) compositions are “unconfined by genres and musical classifications” (V13 Media), combining her “glass-like voice” (Earshot Jazz) with folk roots and avant-garde chamber music.
Most recently, her work has been commissioned and performed by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Modern Orchestra, the Fresh Squeezed Opera Company (NYC), and Karin Stevens Dance, and has enjoyed support from such organizations as the Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, the Allied Arts Foundation, the International Alliance for Women in Music, and 4Culture. With her husband and Greek bouzouki player Rian Souleles, she fronts the Seattle-based Ineffable String Band.
Her debut solo album cedar, an electro-chamber pop song cycle oriented in both art song and ambient IDM, came out in February 2022 on Bright Shiny Things. Cedar, both origin story and manifesto, captures a distinct Pacific Northwestern aesthetic: tuneful beauty, solitude, and destructive noise.
Her much anticipated follow-up record Lookout released March 15, 2024 on Strange Moon Records. Of Lookout, Seattle musician and writer Ian Shuler writes: “She shares space with other artists who dance between the natural and spiritual worlds: Sufjan Stevens, Weyes Blood, and Eaton’s most potent (but unstreamable) muse, Joanna Newsom. The classically trained harpist’s spirit rides throughout the album, from the galloping chorus of “Jeffrey Pine” to the Laurel Canyon lilt of “The End of the Line.” Like Newsom, Eaton still refuses to choose a lane. She composes with the full command of her four music degrees and classical training, but there’s an American-ness that can’t be shaken on Lookout. A sorrow, wildness, and expansiveness, not of the European classical tradition, but of jazz, blues and folk. Kaley Lane Eaton is all of these things and more. And none of them precisely.”
In addition to frequently performing her own work, she is an avid collaborator, interpreting the work of others and enjoying both traditional commissions and unconventional creation with composers, choreographers, solo artists and chamber ensembles across the country. As both a bandleader and vocalist/pianist, she has performed with such esteemed artists as Chris Icasiano, Kelsey Mines, James Falzone, Johnaye Kendrick, Alina To, Ronnie Malley, Tom Baker and the Tom Baker Quartet, Ray Larsen, Abbey Blackwell, Neil Welch, Steve Treseler, Ha-Yang Kim, Lily Press, and Simon Linn-Gerstein.
With flutist/composer Leanna Keith and violist/composer Heather Bentley, Eaton co-directs Kin of the Moon, an improvisation-centric and technology-friendly chamber troupe in Seattle. KOTM reflects Eaton, Keith, and Bentley’s collective values: that the pursuit of higher vibrational states, whether through Music, movement, artistic creation, scholarship, or any kind of curiosity, is the destiny of humanity, and is the birthright of every person on this beautiful planet.
As a scholar with particular interest in the role of music's relationship to feminism, technology, education, and our larger culture, Eaton has been presented by the College Music Society International Conference (Liberation and Abuse in Electronic Music, June 2025) and published by KING FM's Second Inversion ("Women, Creativity, and the Classroom" (2016) and "Reflections on Wilderness" (2017)) and Common Tone Arts (“Hit the reset button: Rethinking how we teach music technology” (2020) and "Things I wish I had known when I thought I couldn't be a composer" (2017)).
Eaton holds a DMA in composition from the University of Washington and and is Chair of Music and Associate Professor at Cornish College of the Arts. She lives in a little blue house in Seattle with her husband Rian, dog Nikos, and the many, many plants, birds, bugs, and slugs in their garden.