Katy Pinke is gearing up for the second leg of her tour behind newest album Strange Behavior, and she’s clearly very eager to get on the road again — as the bard William Nelson once warbled — even in a world gone mad.
Pinke has already finished an initial run of dates on the Northeast, playing as a duo with Nico Osborne and putting on dazzling and eccentric performances that saw her interpret her adventurous indie-rock through, of course, guitars but also theatrical performance and staging.
This second, just-commenced leg of Strange Behavior roadwork sees Pinke striking out southward solo, including — crucially — three Florida dates in three very different cities: Tallahassee, Gainesville and Casselberry. Set up by former Orlandoan and statewide music mover Steven Head, these shows will be Pinke’s first time playing the state.
Pinke describes herself as an interdisciplinary artist, with experience in acting, set design and as a painter — and these are sides of herself that Pinke integrates seamlessly into her musical practice with masks, dramatic lighting and body movement, projections and, of late, puppets.
Those same puppets are making the journey to Florida with Pinke. She says her current performances are a bit “Andy Kaufman-esque,” trying things out on the fly mid-set, keeping spontaneity and chance operations centered.
“I like artists that are kind of interdisciplinary and that explore the nonlinear, kind of irrational, wacky sides of the unconscious. And I feel like puppets lend themselves really well to that,” says Pinke. “I went to clown school way back, and I think that acting training and all of those experiences definitely are making their way into my consciousness even when I ‘just’ play music and I’m not involving other elements. There’s definitely a sense of theater about things.”
The songs Pinke is performing on this tour will be in large part drawn from her freshly released album, Strange Behavior — also her first proper vinyl release (so bring some cash to this otherwise free show). The record is a big step forward for Pinke’s sound, with songs that would once be presented in a skeletal and beautifully stark fashion now given lush and orchestrated arrangements with kaleidoscopic instrumentation and sprightly musical flights. There’s some intrigue, in that these solo shows feature Pinke methodically deconstructing the new songs back down to solo hymns.
“A lot of these songs were all written originally with just me with a guitar. So there’s something fun about bringing it back to that and just letting the song structures and the lyrics stand out and speak for themselves,”says Pinke.“I’m not going to have my band, but now I have the advantage of being in-person with my body and my face and the whole presentation in front of people. So that will hopefully fill in a sense of the world without having all the extra bells and whistles of having a band with me. I see it as an opportunity for another kind of world-building.”
Despite this solo deconstruction, Pinke is excited about Strange Behavior as a finished document. On this record she explored new sounds and new ways of expressing herself through a wider musical palette — indie-pop writ large and brightly hued.
“I think that there’s something about these songs, I feel like there’s a kind of clownishness and — there I go bringing that up — there’s a kind of sense of humor about a lot of them. They feel lighter to me. They deal with heavy themes, but in this slightly funhouse way. There’s sometimes a self-deprecating thing, and there’s something that I feel lends itself to more color,” says Pinke. “My co-producer and I, Nico Osborne … we let ourselves get silly but ended up producing some really cool sounds.”
For an artist as resolutely focused on forward movement and creative evolution as Pinke, what makes the songs on Strange Behavior especially notable is that many had been intended for her eponymous debut. Pinke demurred on using the songs then but kept steadily working on them, feeling the lyrics needed to be shared.
“Once I’ve written a song and it exists, and I’ve performed it out, it’s kind of like, not up to me anymore. … With these songs, a lot of them were ones I was holding on to because maybe I felt that self-doubt at first, because they were a little bit exposing,” says Pinke. “But they exist. They came from somewhere real at certain times in my life. So someone might get something from them. Who am I to not honor them and let them be in the world?”
Those songs, and Katy Pinke, will be in our world Thursday.
[location-1]Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Bluesky | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
Related Stories
Orlando concert calendar: Explosions in the Sky, Luis Fonsi, 311, John Waite
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2025.