Kate is an American illustrator and painter who does her best work while listening to the music of The Cure. Of course, she enjoys other bands very much, just not quite as much. Her first encounter with a Cure song came during that magical, behind-the-looking-glass, lost-in-the-labyrinth, time in her life, where the yellow brick road of childhood ends, and that boring existence called "adulthood" feels wrong and far away just yet. But interesting...

She still vividly remembers coming home from school, heading straight to her room to peel off her Catholic uniform—but first, music! As she tuned the dial on her portable plastic purple stereo, she searched the airwaves for her favorite, student-run radio stations in the low-end frequencies between 87.8 and 91.7 FM. Aha! Kate pressed "record" and "play" on the tape player as an R.E.M. song ended, and an unknown tune began. The silence broke with these five perfect words: 
Why can't I be you?
Why can't I be you?

A voice repeated them over and over, then howled as an uptempo beat began, backed by a synthesized brass section, deep, punchy bass, and the hyperventilating wails of some peculiar creature.

You turn
You turn my head when you turn around
You turn my whole world upside down...

This extended radio edit of "Why Can't I Be You?" by The Cure hit all the right chords at just the right moment in the fourteenth year of Kate's life. The song, and then its followup single, "Just Like Heaven," would become her benchmarks for all music going forward. Nothing else on the radio connected so instantly. Hungry for more, she devoured a decade's worth of Cure albums until she exhausted her allowance and her Columbia House trial, 10 cassettes for one dollar. So began Kate's quest to to find all the things she liked, on her own, with zero influence from her very concerned parents. 

In an instant, the catalog of The Cure's albums strung a shimmering lifeline to the hollows in her heart. There it remains to this day. 

Follow Kate on IG: @forgetaboutstars and @katesnowbird