According to poet Charles Bukowski, “Style is the answer to everything.”It certainly seems to have been the answer to the question that singer Kimmi Bitter was asking herself a decade ago, back when she was fronting a bluesy psychedelic rock band. In 2019, she and bandmates Willis Farnsworth (guitar), Ben Neal (bass) and Justin de la Vega (drums) made a seamless transition to Americana and country, and she realized it was what she had wanted all along.“I felt like I was getting more recognition,” she says. “It just felt like it was where I was supposed to be.”In 2022, Bitter released the single “My Grass is Blue.” At the time, retro country was making a modest comeback, but the country genre was still dominated by “bro-country” — heavy on beer, trucks, and good times. Then, guitarist Farnsworth sent the song to an influential blog called Saving Country Music run by a guy called Trigger. Trigger said he didn’t cover singles but agreed to give it a listen.“He fell in love with it and blasted it,” Bitter says. From his July 24, 2022, post on his current playlist: “Whoa! Where did this come from? Kimmi Bitter is a California native who tours around the country in a camper van, doing what she can to revitalize the vintage sounds of American music. Her latest effort is this shiver-inducing classic country song with bluegrass inspiration that very well could have been cut by Patsy Cline in 1962.”After that, she started gaining fans on a national level. Trigger pushed her to make an entire album of throwback-style country. She responded with the album “Old School” in 2024, and it went on to win the 2025 Best Country/Americana Album at the San Diego Music Awards.“That album broke me into that underground Americana, retro-country world,” she says. For his part, Trigger wrote that “If you’re one of those souls that is charmed or cursed with a foreign feeling to this time and place, and one of the few antidotes is classic country records from either past stars or contemporary ones, this Kimmi Bitter debut album will land in your lap like manna from the gods.”Riding the momentum and looking to expand upon the sound and success of Old School, Bitter has been working on her new album titled Bittersweet for the past two years. “This album is going a little bit full circle,” she says. “It touches a little bit back into the psychedelic rock sound, but still very much countrypolitan.” (Countrypolitan? Think Roy Orbison and Patsy Cline pop country of the early ‘60s.) “‘Old School’ had some honky-tonk elements. I kind of wanted to get away from that and the cowgirl persona. I wanted to embrace my California roots. Doing country music, I felt like I needed to hide that a little bit.” Now, having toured and been embraced all over the nation, she wants the new album to feel like a destination — whether that’s a place or time in history. “I’m just trying to own California,” she says. “I really wanted the new album to sound like a vacation. Even though there are a lot of heartbreak ballad songs, there’s also a full-blown surf rock instrumental, then there’s a late ‘60s psychedelic sound out of San Francisco like Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin… without the growl. People sometimes describe us as surf-rock country because of Willis’ tones [on the guitar]. I don’t feel like we intentionally did that. But I guess you can’t kick the California out of us. It’s just in our blood.”Her sophomore effort took twice as long to make and was twice as expensive as the first, but she feels it was worth it. “They’re little labors of love,” she says. “I really want to one-up the other album. I had some success with the last album, but I didn’t want that to be where I peaked.” The new album has what Bitter calls a “cinematic aesthetic. A comment I get a lot,” she says, “is that my music sounds like a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack. It’s the greatest compliment — and a life goal to have my music in one of his films. After shows, I always ask the crowd if anybody knows him, or knows somebody who does, then to come up to me. I really want to get into a film.”Bitter and the band chose Lou Lou’s Jungle Room for the album debut party of “Bittersweet.” There, you’ll be able to snag the vinyl version of the album before it hits streaming platforms on August 21.“When I chose my album release show, I thought, ‘There’s no other place that fits my vibe better.’ I hope the audience will feel transported: for that hour and a half, I hope they’ll feel like they were truly back in the ‘60s. I hope sonically and aesthetically it feels that way. And I hope it does feel like a movie.”
Where: Lou Lou’s Jungle Room, 2225 El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego When: Friday, July 24, 2026, at 8:15 pm Ages: 21+ Cost: Free, but seating is first-come, first-servedHence then, the article about bringing the coastland to the heartland kimmi bitter embraces california roots in new album was published today ( ) and is available on Times of San Diego ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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