Kate Jacobs is a world traveling downhome country girl who lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. She is a storyteller who finds her stories in all sorts of places and from all kinds of people. On Hydrangea, her third album for Bar/None, she reveals that the most compelling stories are her own.

This time she's found them in the attic of her parents' two hundred year-old farm house: in diaries and journals that survived the journey from pre-Revolutionary Russia to the Hudson Valley, in an uncle's paintings, and in her own head and heart. In an era when artists often choose between the relentlessly tortured or the breathlessly confessional, Kate takes a deceptively simple route. Hydrangea is a family history -- colorful, sad, funny, a wide-screen snow swept epic at some times, an intimate kitchen table conversation at others. With her lilting melodies and country-tinged rock, Kate's stories go down as warm and easy as vintage Dolly Parton, but they have an emotional and musical depth that gives them staying power. These are tales meant to be heard again and again until they might just feel like your own.

"I'm fascinated with stories," she told a reporter while she was touring in support of her first Bar/None release, The Calm Comes After, in l993. "The question I most frequently ask is, 'And then what happened?'"

Kate hasn't had to look far for some of the most remarkable tales she has turned into tunes. On the Russian side of the family, which fled their homeland during the revolution, there was a physician great-grandfather who numbered Anton Chekov among his friends, Leo Tolstoy among his patients, and a dying teenager named Elena as his secret admirer. Moved by the spirit and humor of Elena's diary (found in the attic, translated by Kate's mother) Kate wrote "Good Doctor." The American side of the family had been settled for three centuries in the Hudson Valley of New York. Among them was an uncle who went to Manhattan in the thirties to study painting with Thomas Hart Benton and George Grosz, then traveled to Spain to join the American brigades during the Spanish civil war and never came home. The paintings and letters he left behind inspired the bittersweet "Eddy Went To Spain." Then there are Kate's own stories, her own inspirations and concerns: gardens, birds, Dusty Springfield, love and fear, love and hope, love and ambivalence, and just plain love.

Kate wanted to be a dancer. She studied ballet in England and France, but when she got to Hoboken, with its big city views and small town music scene, she turned to songwriting. As she has said about her first album, "I decided to learn how to play guitar and see about the songs in my head. Somehow, the hymns and the show tunes and folk songs and operettas and bad country radio and dreamy ballet music have brought me here." Kate has a country charm that masks a more worldly background: she was born and initially raised in Virginia, but her family moved to Europe and she did most of her growing up there. In 1992 she found herself and her fledgling band on a stage in Piazza San Marco in Venice, representing American country music at a two-week long music festival. Although she knew she wasn't exactly the real thing, she was well-traveled enough and sufficiently borderless in her music and her life to charm the Venetians with her own very personal brand of Americana.

Kate's second album for Bar/None, (What About Regret) released in l995, attracted considerable critical acclaim. The Washington Post declared that Kate's songs "possess a haunting power and intimacy"; the Minneapolis City Pages called Kate "probably the most poignant storyteller in indieland." But her album, and subsequent tour attracted more than just critical kudos: a children's books editor from Hyperion was so taken with "A Sister," which she had heard on Vin Scelsa's "Idiot's Delight" radio show, that she offered Kate a book deal. Kate transformed the lyrics of "A Sister" into a subtle tale in verse form of a young girl with too many step brothers who longs for a sister. Bar/None released a five-song EP in 1996 in conjunction with the book.

Hydrangea was recorded, appropriately enough, in somewhat itinerant fashion in Hoboken, New York City, and New Orleans (where Vicki Peterson and Susan Cowsill contributed vocals and former Hobokenite Peter Holsapple added keyboards). Among the other players are Kate's frequent collaborators Dave Schramm (who dueted with Kate on "The Heart Of The Matter" from the "A Sister" EP and co-wrote several songs here) and James MacMillan whose experience with choral conducting came in handy: Children's choruses from two Hoboken institutions, the Mustard Seed School and the Hudson School, performed two songs inspired by poet Anna Akhmatova -- "a very Russian, intensely moral, lonely and passionate poet," says Kate --one of which provides the lovely, bittersweet conclusion to the winding journey that is Hydrangea.