At Katharine Whalen’s farm in Efland, North Carolina, there is a bookcase that has a way of keeping secrets. The Certain Seas and Katherine Whalen’s Jazz Squad singer and multi-instrumentalist has lived there for 30 years; long enough for things to appear and disappear. “They’re there, and then they’re not, and it’s just the way of it,” she explains.
But two summers ago, while moving books around in the heat, she pulled out a gray box that didn’t look like much of anything and turned it over in her hands. On its spine were track listings she recognized immediately. It was the original half-inch tape of Roasted Right, the 1994 debut EP from Squirrel Nut Zippers, the first recording she ever made with the first band she ever joined. Somehow, against all reasonable expectation, it had survived.
“I thought, my God, how has this survived in this house?” she says. “I don’t heat upstairs, and I don’t have air conditioning except in the two bedrooms. It’s like a tent.” She expected the tape to be ruined, if not warped, by decades of North Carolina summers. Instead, when it was finally transferred — after being shipped to somewhere with a machine capable of processing half-inch tape — the whole thing played cleanly. No skips or hiccups. “It’s crazy,” she says with a laugh.
This past April, Roasted Right got its official reissue on Record Store Day via Modern Harmonic, the label Whalen now records with through a connection that itself feels almost fated. Jay Millar, the label’s founder, had relocated to the area from Nashville and happened to wander past Yonder in Hillsborough, on a night when Whalen was performing a residency with the Jazz Squad ensemble. He didn’t know it was her at first, he just heard the music and stopped. Afterward, she spotted him at a table and went to say hello to an old friend. “He was like, ‘My God, I’m just walking by thinking about moving to this town, and one of my favorite artists is playing,’” she recalls. “So we’re moving [to Hillsborough]. It was like that.”
When she discovered the tape, Millar was the first person she called, and he practically bolted over. “He’s like, ‘I’ll be right there,’” she says. “I remember him driving up in his little car, seeing the tapes, and saying ‘Yes, yes, let’s see what we can do.’”
That enthusiasm shaped everything that followed. The reissue, newly mixed from the original multitracks by Millar, expands Roasted Right into something closer to a document than a simple re-release: six tracks from the original 1994 sessions on the A-side, and three more on the B-side drawn from phone recordings Whalen made at a rehearsal ahead of the band’s North Carolina Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony in late 2021.
“I recorded them just to go back and listen to and see how we sounded,” Whalen explains. “We were in the living room of the drummer’s brother, just in a circle.” The practicality of it has its own charm; the same informal setup as the beginning, three decades on, now documented by a phone instead of whatever tape machine was available. When the label wanted to expand the record’s running time, Whalen offered up the recordings rather than go digging for something more polished. It’s a fitting full circle moment that really makes this reissue special.
The original Roasted Right sessions were cut at Yellow House Studio on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill. A space that is now, as best Whalen can tell, a parking lot. The band recorded it in roughly a day. At the time, Squirrel Nut Zippers were barely a band at all, having formed just that summer. “We didn’t really ever do any covers,” she says. “There was just sort of a small body of work, which I guess was the first EP.” They played two nights at a small bistro called Henry’s, packed it out both times, and left with a record deal from Merge — then a scrappy local operation, long before it became the institution it is today. “They came to our first show and said, ‘We’d like to make an EP,’” Whalen says. “It was really just lucky.”
The quickness of it all was not lost on her friends, many of whom had been grinding away in bands for years. “All my friends who had been doing it for years were like, ‘I fucking hate you. What the hell?’” She pauses, then: “It just happened. You don’t know who’s going to show up when.”
What’s notable about Roasted Right in retrospect, she suggests, is how raw the band still was and how that rawness was an asset. The horn players who would come to define the classic SNZ sound hadn’t joined yet. What you hear on the tape is a string band, finding its footing, pulling from wildly different directions without apology. “We had a punk rock drummer,” she says. “That was a secret.” The guitar players didn’t know all the chords and voicings, but nobody was pretending otherwise. “It made it charming,” she says. “We were all trying to learn our instruments, we were all trying to learn the material. The convergence of influences more than, like, ‘We’re going to draw a line in the sand.’”
The liner notes that accompany the reissue were written by Whalen herself, drafted in pieces at the register of the Habitat ReStore in Hillsborough, where she works. “I do a lot of my finest work at work,” she says. “When I have to sit down, it just came to me.” What she wrote surprised even her a little: a personal essay about the early days of the band and, more specifically, the love story at its center. Squirrel Nut Zippers was where Whalen met her husband, guitarist Jimbo Mathus, something she had rarely discussed publicly before this record gave her a reason to. She included photographs from an early beach trip. “That’s kind of the genesis of this,” she says. “It was our love story.”
She asked Mathus if he was comfortable with it. He told her to go ahead.
Whalen didn’t rush the reissue once she found the tape. She sat with it for a year before deciding what to do, and what she landed on was the opposite of a quick cash-in. The vinyl format, the expanded track listing, the personal liner notes, the inclusion of the Hall of Fame rehearsal recordings: all of it was deliberate. “I thought it would be cool if it had more stuff,” she says. “Especially with Record Store Day, that’s kind of the whole vibe. It’s meant to be this memento.”
She has also entertained the idea of donating the original tape and materials to the UNC Music Archive. “North Carolina music stuff doesn’t really need to go back in the bookcase,” she says.
To celebrate the release, she performed songs from the EP live on Record Store Day at Volume Records in Hillsborough with her current band, Certain Seas, filling in for the original lineup.
Asked how it feels to frame this thirty-year-old recording alongside her current work with Jazz Squad and Certain Seas, Whalen resists the temptation to make it mean more than it does. “It just feels like another sort of logical step,” she says. “I don’t think it’s any bigger or smaller than anything else.” Then she adds: “Everything informs everything else. When I do a Jazz Squad release, it helps Certain Seas, and vice versa. This will help everything.”
She pauses. “And it being the very first thing I ever worked on is super cool.”
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