She’s the mind and muscle behind the cassette-only label Den Tapes, the manager of Sonic Boom Records, the assistant booker at the Sunset Tavern, and a KJ at Hattie’s Hat—all of which is why she was once called “the unofficial mayor of Ballard” by this very publication. She’s a musician, a photographer, a lifelong fangirl, and a local music champion. She’s Kay Redden, and she’s a fucking genius. “Do you like working?” I asked her last month, mystified, on the eve of the fifth annual Den Fest. “I do,” she responded. “It helps keep the demons at bay.”
Redden grew up an only child in Garland, Texas, the town that inspired King of the Hill (she deeply relates to Bobby, BTW). Asked when her love of music emerged, she says, “When I landed on Earth, probably, or when my parents were… [makes thrusting motion].” We chuckled. Her father was a music obsessive and cassette collector who taught her to scour garage sales for tapes. “I would play a tape like 1,000 times until it sounded like hell, and we had to find another copy.”
Like most 30-somethings, Redden developed her musical taste through music videos on TV and internet rabbit holes. She upheld the sacred ritual of following a musical family tree: poring over liner notes, biographies, music magazines, and online forums to find the roots and branches that connect bands to their inspirations, labelmates, and side projects. For example, Redden discovered that Doug Martsch, frontman of Built to Spill, was in the band the Halo Benders with Calvin Johnson, the vocalist of Beat Happening and founder of K Records. From K Records sprouted a million more branches. (Kay and I both have tattoos of the K Records logo, as did Kurt Cobain.)
“Running this label is fucking lovely. People who did not know each other previously have all melted into this beautiful thing.”
A young Redden noticed Built to Spill had plenty of PNW tour dates, but only one stop in Denton, Texas. She had spent years looking longingly at her Seattle skyline desktop background until she finally got the guts to make the move in 2012. “I thought, if I don’t take the leap now, will I ever?” Everyone in her family was supportive except for her grandmother, who was “pissed” that Redden wouldn’t just move three hours away to Austin. “There was something deep inside of me that always knew there was something here for me, I just didn’t know what.”
Her first three years here—spent living in Lake City and commuting to work at a Whole Foods in Bellevue (“nobody told me how far Bellevue was, nobody tells you that”)—weren’t the indie-rock dream she hoped for. Though she attended as many live shows as she could, she found the crowds standoffish. Nobody, even those who seemed into the music, wanted to chat. “If you were not already in the know, people did not want to talk to you.” She found the stand-up-comedy community far more welcoming.
Then her world shattered. Her mother died unexpectedly, at the age of 56. “When she died, I felt truly stronger than ever,” Redden explains. “It was a very weird feeling—I could feel her, as if she left the good things about herself with me.” The grief expedited answers to a question that had long haunted her: “What am I here for?”
Redden remembers the birth of Den Tapes in vivid detail: A few weeks after her mother’s memorial, she was lying on the couch, feeling untethered from Earth. She was unhappy in her relationship and was just beginning to realize it. “You know when you’re in that fucked-up part of a relationship where nothing feels good?” I had an epiphany that I don’t have to wait for things to happen,” she tells me. “I was like, ‘I’m not fucking happy doing what I’m doing. I’m gonna break up with this stupid fuck and start making tapes.’”
Though she’d wanted to be more involved in the local music scene, Redden had never seriously considered running a label. But 2015 was the right time for tapes—there was a growing interest in the format, which had not yet reached the mainstream and were still relatively cheap to make. “I don’t think I’d start a tape label in 2026,” she admits, “But I could definitely start one in 2015.” The first Den Tapes release was a stand-up comedy set from friend and comedian Albert Kirchner. She copied 25 tapes, one at a time by hand, with a Sony cassette deck in her Lake City living room.
In 2016, Redden met longtime friends Willy Walker and Dan Spaulding, who helped her run the label—staying up all night copying tapes, watching movies and cartoons, and smoking weed—for the next four years. “I met them at a [Wimps and] Pony Time show,” she says. “We were the only people dancing.”
By 2020, Walker and Spaulding had moved away; Redden continued operating the label on her own, but outsourced the time-consuming duplication process to Canadian company Duplication. “They’ve always been good to us,” she says. “And they sound so good.”
But running the label is a massive undertaking. When you order a tape, Redden drops it off at the post office. If you send Den Tapes an email, Redden responds. She not only organizes the two-day Den Fest that showcases bands on the label, but also holds down the merch table. Along with all this, she also avidly attends shows and hunts for new bands to sign. “More often than not, I discover bands through friends or friends-of-friends—but I don’t want that to sound cliquey,” Redden explains. “I like that the circle keeps getting bigger and that the community keeps growing.”
In 2019, Redden began privately writing and recording music as Bog Star (an ode to the wetland flower, as well as the ’70s power-pop band, Big Star). She didn’t drop her first tape, the beginnings, until last year. “I guess the older I’ve gotten, the more ‘fuck it’ I’ve gotten,” she explains. “A large part of starting the label was that I didn’t play music—I was just a longtime deep appreciator,” she tells me. “It was weird to think about me doing it.” the beginnings is sweetly somber, lyrically complex, and deeply personal. Redden’s voice has the quality of the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker or Beat Happening’s Heather Lewis (two of my all-time favorite vocalists). Her use of drum machines, electric guitars, and diaristic confessions reminds me of Kathleen Hanna’s 1998 solo project, the Julie Ruin.
Since the start of Den Tapes 11 years ago, Redden has released more than 100 albums by local artists. Like K Records or Kill Rock Stars, Den Tapes has become synonymous with the great PNW artists of our time: Zookraught, Tomo Nakayama, Coral Grief, Versing, Linda From Work, Beverly Crusher, Wild Powwers, Bad Optics, Don Piano… the list goes on. “It’s unfathomable to me most of the time what Den Tapes has become,” says Redden. “Labels and communities like these are all the things I looked up to my entire life, and now I’m like, ‘Oh, I did it.’”
Redden has never made money from running Den Tapes, and she has no expectation of doing so. All profits are funneled back into the label to release more tapes and sprout more musical branches.
But just before the fest, when money was tight, Redden was asking herself if people even cared. Den Fest brought her out of that headspace. “Running this label is fucking lovely,” she says. “The fact that all these people who did not know each other previously have all melted into this beautiful thing makes me tear up when I think about it.” That the community she built after her mother’s passing calls her “Mama Kay” is not lost on her. “It’s funny,” Redden says, “Of course I wish she was still here, but I really don’t think any of this would have happened without gaining that strength from my grief.”
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