Meet Desperate Electric

Desperate Electric initially started as a four piece rock band called DASH in February 2018. Ben Morris and I (Kayti Korte), had been in another band together prior to DASH, and we’d also been dating for two years. We started writing songs together in December 2017 and realized pretty quickly that we had something to say, together, and wanted to start our own project. We played our first show in March 2018, recorded our first album, and went on our first tour in October of that year, and played as many shows as we could. Ben and I’s goal has always been to tour as full time as possible, and we made that clear from the get go. Unfortunately, touring is incredibly demanding and not especially lucrative. It takes a special kind of lunatic to sign up to live in a van with four other people and the only certainty being playing the shows. By the end of the year we had replaced our bass player and on January 1st, 2019 our drummer quit two weeks prior to our second tour, and longest to date. That tour saw the very beginnings of us using midi drum tracks. Unable to find a drummer available for a three week tour with two weeks notice, Ben, being the musical and production guru he is, created midi drum tracks for all of our songs in two days. After that tour we lost our second bass player and a year after DASH was founded, we were right back where we started. Just the two of us. We hadn’t stopped booking, so we found ourselves six weeks out from our next tour with no band. We found a drummer from Chicago, flew him to Montana for the tour and I started playing bass seven days before our first show. We started that tour with me, a brand new bass player, and Paul, a drummer we knew nothing about. After that tour, which actually went much better than expected, we found ourselves once again without a band. After a few more drummers and hiccups, we made the transition to the duo we are today. Ben worked on the production of our drum tracks, creating a combination of pre-recorded live drums and midi instrumentation and we hit the road as the duo. We kept booking tours and were finally able to make our goal of touring full time a reality. We moved out of our house and into our van in July and hit the road for the rest of the year. On February 10th of this year, we changed our name to Desperate Electric–the name of our EP we released last year, the first foray into the electro soul duo. And here we are now!

Not exactly! If you gathered anything from our history, it’s that all we’ve done is change. Pretty much since the get go! Ben and I always envisioned the four piece rock band. That always felt like the goal. When we weren’t able to maintain that it felt like failure, and in reality it was our biggest blessing. Of course, there’s the constant struggle of being work partners, band mates, and romantic partners. Work/life balance has always been a struggle for us. We’re both fiery, passionate Aries and it’s really easy to put work and making music at the forefront and not work on our relationship.

Desperate Electric is an electro soul duo. We make music that we want to listen to, and that means taking influence from pretty much every single genre. I think we’re known for being a little crazy and being absolutely persistent in our quest to make music and tour full time. That’s the thing I’m most proud of; our persistence. It’s definitely not been an easy road, and any touring musician will tell you just how difficult it is. Both Ben and I are bull headed as all get out and refuse to quit–no matter what. I’m not even sure what it would take to get either of us to give up on this, or each other. I think our connection to each other and this project really sets us apart. It makes the all the more difficult in some ways, but I get to make music with my favorite person in the world every day. It’s how we communicate with each other and the world and I think that’s pretty special.

That’s such a difficult question! I think success has many, many layers. On one hand, and maybe the more surface hand, setting and achieving goals is kind of our baseline of success. Outlining what we want out of the next six months, year, five years, and being able to achieve those things. That always feels good, but I also thing success can be overcoming the obstacles that you encounter along the way as well. Every time we come out on the other side of some road block it feels like a win. I think any small thing that you work on and achieve should be measured as success. Those small achievements are just fuel for the large achievements.