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A Musical Life: Bill And Karlee Goffrier

Courtesy photo

Few would have guessed that Bill and Karlee’s musical life would now be based in Wichita. Bill left Kansas for Boston in 1983, leaving behind his musical ambitions to focus on painting. Karlee grew up near the beach south of Boston, and when Bill found her basking on a stack of poems and a Radio Shack keyboard in 2010, he knew he had found a songwriter and partner. Showered with autoharps and ukuleles, she blossomed into the better half of the duo, which records and serves its songs, still warm, at bandcamp.com. Trips to Wichita resulted in musical projects with Tom Page Trio and Mark Foley, and now a long-term local residency.

Bill Goffrier: I’m Bill

Karlee Goffrier: And I’m Karlee Goffrier.

Bill Goffrier: And together we are Bill and Karlee Goffrier—the duo.

I first met Karlee in 2010 in the South Shore area of Massachusetts, south of Boston. And, although I was still doing some music with a reunited Big Dipper band that was kind of finishing up and there weren’t any future plans for that. But I was pursuing kind of a solo career. But when I met Karlee I wanted to spend so much time with her that I thought, ‘Hmm, how am I going to hang out with Karlee and still get a lot of songwriting time in?’ And then when I found out she was writing poems and had this keyboard, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just have her start writing songs with me.’

Karlee Goffrier: We never actually said, ‘Hey, let’s sit down and write songs together.’ It just sort of happened.

For the first Christmas that Bill and I spent together, Bill bought me an autoharp.

I surprised myself because I had never sung before. So it was just a challenge for me to just get up on stage. I’d never done anything like that before in my life.

Jedd Beaudoin is host/producer of the nationally syndicated program Strange Currency. He has also served as an arts reporter, a producer of A Musical Life and a founding member of the KMUW Movie Club. As a music journalist, his work has appeared in Pop Matters, Vox, No Depression and Keyboard Magazine.