It’s hard to ignore Kate Pierson’s scarlet hair. She was inspired by the henna-friendly Moroccans whom she met as a backpacker in Europe after graduating from Boston University in 1970.
“I started doing it then,” she said this week during an interview at her studio, a former dojo in Shokan. Pierson, a key member of the seminal new wave pop band the B-52s, moved to Woodstock in 1987 and has owned her studio for two decades.
“It was so messy that no hair salon wanted to deal with it,” said Pierson, who is now, impossibly, 77. “I’ve had all different shades of red, from strawberry kind of red to purplish red to pinkish red. To whatever it is now.”
The red hair has been her signature—impossibly bright at the SNL 50 concert, a beacon amid the delirium of “Roam” and “Love Shack.” In person it seems like less a costume than an extension of her sensibility: Tactile, playful, a little outrageous, and above all unafraid.
That Pierson will be on stage for what she describes as “another chance to rise up for democracy,” a benefit concert and rally for Indivisible Hurley/Woodstock and Indivisible Ulster at the Colony in Woodstock, this Sunday from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. Tickets have been sold out for months, although some are available at the gate.
“There’s so much negativity and a doomsday feeling,” she said. “The only thing you can do is try to push back on a local level. I just think this is the most important thing we can do.”
She’s also booked for shows Aug. 27 at the Blue Ocean Music Hall in Salisbury, Mass. and Aug. 29 at Provincetown Town Hall on Cape Cod. Pierson splits her time between the Catskills and the Outer Cape. “It’s changed my life to be by the ocean,” Pierson said. “Best of both worlds.”
“She’s one of the greatest and most distinctive voices to come out of punk and new wave, no question,” said veteran music journalist Will Hermes. “And those cameos on R.E.M.’s “Out of Time” really knocked me out—I still think she should do a duets LP with Michael Stipe.”
Pierson speaks in loops, circling back to add a detail or widen the frame. In the course of an hour, she toggled from her Irish Catholic upbringing in Weehawken and Rutherford, N.J. to her stint as a diet aide at Massachusetts General Hospital (“green uniform by day, bell bottoms at night”) and a year-and-a-half hitchhiking through Europe, to the small goat farm she ran in Athens, Georgia, before the B-52s even formed up.
“I got this great place out in the country that was really like a love shack—tin roof, rusted—in the middle of a field, a funky old shack.I raised a few goats and had a great big garden,” she said. “Then I met the rest of the band and we started playing and writing songs.”
Her route to Shokan ran through grief. After Ricky Wilson, the band’s founding guitarist, died from AIDS in 1985, drummer Keith Strickland, who switched to guitar after Wilson’s death, wanted to get out of New York City. “And our friend Laura Levine, the rock photographer invited us up and we found our home. Keith got a place, I found this little cabin that I bought, and I’ve been here ever since.”
She held onto her New York place until 2000, when she built her current house in Woodstock.
The area has “a lot of old hippies, of which I am a part,” she said. “I love the hippie ethos of peace and love.”
Her creative process is slippery as evident by the beautiful chaos of her studio. Photos of Pierson with Yoko Ono adorn the walls. Ono’s singing style inspired Pierson whose voice is a powerful, full-throated soprano with a unique timbre that radiates through alt-dance-rock history. Her latest solo album “Radios and Rainbows” was released in 2024, and this August she released a new single “Pillow Queen”. Pierson is also planning an upcoming Christmas album, and participating in a multi-year documentary project about The B52’s.
“You can’t fight when the muse calls,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll think, ‘Oh my God, this is kind of corny, but I have to go with it.’”
Songs arrive while Pierson is walking her German Shepherd, Loki, or in dreams.
“A lot of times, something will just come to me while walking the dog,” she said. “There’s something to be said for walking alone and getting inspiration.”
She prefers to fold political feelings into joy and movement rather than write literal protest songs. Though she said she was inspired by the protest music during the Vietnam War era. Her first concert was Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Mississippi John Hurt. “I was just mesmerized,” she said.
“Dance is resistance in a lot of ways,” she said. “Dancing in the Street was a protest song, but it was totally a dance song.”
Music, she says, can change the way you see the world.
“It did for me,” she said.
Pierson’s heritage is a patchwork. She’s Mayflower on her father’s side, German, and, on her mother’s side, Irish Catholic.
“I very much identified as Irish,” she said. “ My mother’s family would sing Irish songs and drink Irish whiskey and cry. You’d think they were born there.”
Pierson met her wife, Monica, through the Woodstock Wool Company. They ran Lazy Meadow Motel in the Catskills and Lazy Desert Motel in California before selling both in 2021.
One single from 2023, “Every Day Is Halloween,” was co-written by Sia and Sam Dixon. Another, “Evil Love,” was released in 2024. The songs range from buoyant to deeply personal, including “Give Your Heart to Science,” inspired by the death of Pierson’s friend, Jeremy Ayers, a Warhol superstar, writer and artist.
“That’s the wonderful thing about writing songs but especially the solo songs,” she said. “It’s music I never intended to write.” Pierson believes music can make a difference. “Because it did for me,” she said.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.