Meet Karen
After 20 years of establishing herself as an expert in natural health and wellness, singer/songwriter/guitarist Karen Atkins has returned full force to her music career with a new album, In My Room. The album showcases Karen's signature lyrical clarity, commanding guitar hooks and heart-tugging melodies, with all of the added wisdom she acquired from her years of helping others heal themselves.
Co-produced by Atkins herself and multi-instrumentalist/producer Xeno, In My Room also features prominent studio musicians, including bassist Reggie Hamilton (Seal, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston) and drummer Curt Bisquera (Elton John, Mick Jagger, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash), with powerhouse engineers Robert L. Smith (David Bowie, U2, Aerosmith) and Vlado Meller (Celine Dion, Michael Jackson, Red Hot Chili Peppers) rounding out the lineup.
Karen has toured the world and performed in front of over 50,000 fans, sharing the stage with everyone from Lisa Loeb to Ziggy Marley to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. She won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and has had her music in multiple feature films, including Winona Ryder’s 1996 movie Boys. Her music video “You’re My Home” was awarded Most Positive Video of 2012 in the Posi Music Awards and her music videos from this album have been viewed over 250,000 times.
An award-winning ethical entrepreneur, Karen is a natural on stage and on screen; she has been a TED Talk speaker and appeared on Good Morning America.
Born in Brooklyn, Karen set the stage for her music career at the age of 2 when she begged her parents for piano lessons.
At 14, she was invited to be the guitar player of an all female band (Pangaea) that rocked audiences of teenagers on the East Coast, including winning The Battle of The Bands in 1985.
After recording her first LP while in college, she began gigging and built a solid following in New York City and went on a Europe tour opening for the California Guitar Trio. A few years later, Karen was awarded a prize for The John Lennon Songwriting Contest for the single “On The Way Down.”
Karen spent the next two decades studying and teaching close to 50 different health and healing modalities from massage to Qi gong and BodyTalk, a consciousness-based healing system. She ran a successful BodyTalk center in Manhattan and traveled the world to offer highly sought-after workshops and seminars.
In 2011, after settling in the San Francisco Bay Area, Karen started dabbling in the creative process of making music again while beginning to experiment with the effects of different frequencies on the music making process, which resulted in the completion of her album Vibration Project, then later, In My Room.