Kam Franklin Goes Solo

It’s a Thursday evening, and Kam Franklin is already onstage, prepping for the show she’ll be doing an hour later at Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge, a dive bar and music venue in Midtown Houston. 

With Ed “Blacknintendo” Prevost on the keys, she performs two covers—Joy Oladokun’s “If You Got a Problem” and R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts”—sounding like a throatier Angie Stone, baseball cap covering the wild, woolly ’fro she’ll reveal later. She recorded those songs for Mad Black Woman, a 2025 EP that was inspired by online harassment she’d received. “Yes, my racist weirdo encounter,” Franklin said after her rehearsal. “I wanted to make something reflective of Black joy. … So, I wanted to revisit what ‘mad’ meant to me. And to me, ‘mad’ meant expressing myself in a way that was fearless and embraced other people’s emotions.”

The Bryan-College Station-born Franklin, 39, has been on the road, testing out songs from her solo debut, Land of the Neon Sun, released on August 28. This Shoeshine Charley’s gig is one of several summer sets she’s been doing in Houston, a city that’s been her home since she was a toddler—and a place she believes is difficult to win over. “It’s the city of haters, you know,” she said. “If you can win over the folks here, shit, I can go anywhere—LA, New York, Chicago. It doesn’t matter because if you can win over a hater in Houston, you can win over the world.”

For nearly two decades, Franklin has been working hard at being one of Houston’s most accomplished musicians. Since 2011, she’s been the lead vocalist for The Suffers, a Houston-based R&B and funk collective whose patented brand of “Gulf Coast soul” has gotten them everything from mainstream press raves to late-night talk show appearances to their own NPR Tiny Desk Concert. She’s also performed alongside a wide array of artists: Chaka Khan, Brandi Carlile, Questlove, Houston Tejano legends La Mafia, the Houston Symphony, etc. She did a song on the Clifton Chenier tribute project A Tribute to the King of Zydeco, which won a Grammy this year for Best Traditional Roots Music Album. (As a member of the Recording Academy, she’s held several titles, including Governor of the Texas Chapter and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Ambassador.)

For Franklin, Land has been a long time coming. It took seven years of recording with musicians in Houston and Nashville, Tennessee, even launching a Kickstarter to raise $20,000 to finish the album. She also found a co-producer in country singer Margo Price, whom Franklin has toured and collaborated with. “We connected over our shared love of cannabis,” she admitted, “and I actually wrote my song ‘A Bitch Didn’t Listen’ about her. Because she gave me some of her grandma’s cancer cookies, and I didn’t listen to her when she said, ‘Take a nibble and not a bite.’ Listen to your drug dealer, right?”

She started working on Land during the pandemic, back when she was using her lockdown time perfecting the guitar. “I was at COVID University … playing this guitar for 12 hours a day sometimes, because I had nothing else to do,” she said. “So, I came back out with a new skill, and this album has also been an opportunity for me to showcase some songs that I thought were good enough, but possibly too aggressive for The Suffers, or too sad.”

As the songs of Land prove, Franklin can’t help but create music with her heart fully on her sleeve. “If I put my trouble on the record, will I make it go away?” is a chorus she recites on one of the tracks. It’s likely that listeners may compare her to Brittany Howard, another full-figured, guitar-wielding Southern sista who traffics in roots-rock music. But Franklin insists she was inspired by artists further afield who knew how to turn a clever phrase. “It’s John Prine, UGK, Hayes Carll—like punny and funny, but sad,” she said.

Much like the artists who inspired her, Land is all over the place genre-wise. A bulk of it is folk, country, or rock numbers that have Franklin strumming away on the acoustic guitar and providing soothing, sanctified vocals, usually about relationships. But she also changes up the tempo on several tracks, like the dance-poppy “Pho for Breakfast,” which brings to mind Brian Eno-era Talking Heads. The tonal shifts are reminiscent of the eccentric stuff Beck did back in his early Mellow Gold days. It turns out old-school Beck was indeed an inspiration for the exotic easy listener “Profit Bop”: “I told Joffrey, our bass player, I [wanted] the feel of that first Beck album,” she says. “Not the sound, but the feel.”

Franklin is also not afraid to let her Blackness shine. She pulls out the synthesizers and 808s for the anthemic “We Ain’t Going.” (“They don’t want us to breathe / Don’t you know that / They just want us to leave” is a recurring verse.) The closing song is “Sunnyside, TX,” a churchy paean to Houston’s predominantly African-American neighborhood. She says, “I could talk about things that are a little bit more risky, things that are a little bit more Black, things that are a little bit more non-monolithic when it comes to Black stories. And, for me, I want people to know, like, sure, I got this song about my uncle that keeps going back to jail because he acts like he likes it there sometimes. But, then, I have this whole other song about healed relationships and saying thank you for the church—but the church is not gonna stop me from living my life the way I want to.”

As a musician, an interdisciplinary artist, and a supporter of Black and queer voices, Franklin uses her artistic skills to make you move and think. After all, this is an artist who formed the Bayou City Comeback Chorus in 2022—a collective whose EP of psychedelic, choral funk was released on Franklin’s Homegirl Island Records label—as a response to the police-inflicted, global unrest-sparking killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. 

“This is a job I lean into,” she said. “I take advantage of the opportunity to put the message into the music. Because I’ve tried to do it the other way and try to preach and all this shit and, like, people ain’t listening to that shit. However, the same person that’ll tell you they don’t believe in whatever the fuck you’re talking about … will sing my lyrics back to me, talking about, ‘You know, we could do more.’” 

She lets out a chuckle before continuing. “I’m like, OK, great—let me just lean into what works.”

Later that night, Franklin performs in front of a reasonably populated crowd, picking away on an electric guitar and a slide guitar, getting into all the new stuff with her backup band. The audience appears appreciative (not a hater in sight!), and Franklin appreciates them back. She’d love to do a record-release party in H-Town, but she confirmed that’s gonna have to wait until the fall. 

“I told my team that I would actually like to wait until at least a month after the album comes out to do my party and my whatever, because my album’s coming out in the thick of hurricane season,” she said. “I don’t trust the last week of August to throw no event. No, sir!”