Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Gotta admit, the first time I listened to Kat Robichaud’s new album, I wondered what the heck she was doing.

Two listens later, I had my answer.

She was delivering a delightfully different album, one of the best and certainly the most unique we’ve gotten from a former contestant on The Voice.

She’ll have you singing along to the la la la-la-la refrain in the album-opening “Elephant Song.”

Then she elephant stomps songwriting formulas, conventional arrangements and any expectation that this album would mimic her pre-Voice music with her pre-Voice band, The Design.

And wait til you get to the final original track, the marvelous “Why Do You Love Me Now.” Talk about a raw, impassioned vocal. You absolutely have to hear this song.

Of course, the fact that this is a different sort of album shouldn’t come as too much of a shock.

When she launched her Kickstarter campaign to fund it, Kat promised “a theatrical rock explosion.” And this is a rock-and-roller who confesses to becoming “obsessed” with Marilyn Manson when she was in seventh grade.

“Here was somebody who was singing rock and roll, but with these elaborate costumes,” she recalls. “And they were dangerous. And it was so much fun. I just really gravitated toward that.

“And I ended up taking a lot of shit for it because I grew up in a small town in North Carolina where people don’t listen to Marilyn Manson. And you certainly don’t go around telling people that you do.”

Her choice of music certainly didn’t become more popular after Columbine, when parents started pondering the reasons behind the rampage that left 15 dead at a Colorado high school. Kat was in high school at the time.

“When Columbine happened, I’d been listening to Marilyn Manson for several years, and my dad, being a dad — he wasn’t trying to be mean, but he was concerned. When that happened, all the parents freaked out and didn’t know what to do. It was a whole new scary thing we’d never seen before,” Kat remembers.

“And my dad came up into my room and he said, ‘I’ll pay you for all of your Marilyn Manson albums. But I’m going to take them, and I’m going to throw them away.’ And I remember I could not bear it.

“So I went through my stack of CDs, and I picked any CD that didn’t have writing on it, and I gave them to my dad and said they were Marilyn Manson CDs. He paid me, I think, $40 for them. And then he destroyed them.

“But I still have my Marilyn Manson albums.”

She cites other influences in her music — Amanda Palmer, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; and rock operas, like the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” — but even the name of her new album is a nod toward Marilyn Manson.

He released his early music as Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. Kat’s debut album is called “Kat Robichaud and the Darling Misfits.”

Kat says she feared a self-title debut would leave people with the impression that it was a singer-songwriter album, or a pop album.

“I didn’t want to be seen that way. I wanted to be seen as a rock and roll band,” she says.

And who are the Darling Misfits?

“It’s anybody who’s ever felt like they don’t belong,” she says. “Everybody’s invited.”

The album should be delivered to Kickstarter supporters this week. The album will be available to everyone on Jan. 27. And you can pre-order now on iTunes or Amazon.com.

Kat has already released the first single, the wonderfully frenetic, Dr. Who-inspired “Somebody Call the Doctor.” You can check out the equally frenetic lyric video — complete with Dr. Who fans — in the upper right.

Now living in San Francisco, Kat is planning a West Coast album release party there on Friday at Neck of the Woods. An East Coast album release show is set for Feb. 20 at the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh, N.C.

Especially gratifying for the 31-year-old is the way this album came about. About a year ago, she launched the Kickstarter campaign, hoping to raise $20,000.

“I was really terrified that we wouldn’t come close to $20 grand,” Kat admits. “Because at that point, it’s like, I’ve been off the show (The Voice) and I’m relying on people I’ve never met before. Let’s see what their level of dedication is — if they really liked me or if they just watched me on the show and shrugged their shoulders and said: ‘She’s cool, but who’s going to be on Season 6?’

The Kickstarter campaign wound up raising more than $42,000.

“It was amazing,” Kat says. “It was almost like the foundation of moving forward.”

Not to mention the foundation of the theatrical rock-and-roll explosion now known as “Kat Robichaud and the Darling Misfits.”

“To me,” Kat says, “this album is this 12- or 13-year-old girl, being picked on continuously for the kind of music that I liked, getting to step up and say: ‘This is the music that I love, and I’m not ever going to apologize for it.’ And nobody should ever have to apologize for the music they listen to … This is my opportunity to just really be myself.”

Editor’s Note: I’ll be posting more from my interview with Kat Robichaud after the album release, including the story behind a couple of songs that were inspired, at least in part, by her experience on The Voice.