Kaia Kater sounds better after midnight. There’s something about the first hours of morning, the quite stillness, the music lays on you a weighted blanket, let you sink into her low voice and the rythms of the banjo and the poetry of the words —I’m soft and heavy as the night…

I don’t remember the first time I heard Kater, although I am almost certain she drifted into my Spotify feed over the lousy wired headphones plugged into my Dell desktop at my first job. I heard a few of her songs before I really started paying attention, but “Nine Pin” grabbed me —

These clothes you gave me don’t fit right
The belt is loose and the noose is tight

Kater’s music, I learned, is full of these Prufrock moments, twists that make you sit upright and pay attention just when Kater’s voice is lulling you into the music.

It was not until a good deal later that I learned the “Nine Pin” of the title is from a square dance formation, with an odd nine pin out in the center while the squares of eight spin around and around. The song still spoke to me as I walked around my new town, hundreds of miles from friends or family, listening to “Nine Pin” over and over.

Kater’s songs reward repeated listening. I find her songs need time to percolate — the first time I listen to one of her albums I tend to gloss over many of the tracks, only to find myself playing them on repeat months or even years later. The time it takes me to really latch on to the music is rewarded by songs that do not wear out, no matter how many times I’ve listened to them.

Part of this is that Kater is an excellent writer. Her lyrics are impressionistic, even abstract, in the modern folk tradition, but they tell stories all the same. In “Southern Girl,” apple picking and love are set beside strange fruit and graves. There’s whiskey and tumbles in the hay, as in any good country song, but there are ghosts too. On “Grenades,” she tackles colonialism head on, weaving interviews with her father — who fled Grenada as a teenager after the US invasion — in between the songs, which range from the overtly political title track to more surprising choices: what appears at first to be a lilting love song is based on a Swedish vampire film, a kaleidoscopic folk-rock piece is an homage to the Appalachian tradition of apocalyptic hymns.

            But her songs are more than the lyrics. I’ve seen her play solo, just her voice and banjo, and she manages to fill the space with far more music than seemed possible. Her voice is distinct — low, soft, strong; her banjo playing works as well on her protest anthems as her covers of old time songs.

            I must admit part of why I liked Kater so much was a certain unearned feeling of kinship. Fresh out of college, Kater was just a year older and putting out the kind of traditional and folk music I loved, music that until then I had associated largely with older artists and audiences. There was a little bit of the thrill of discovering an artist before she went big, and when I met her after a live performance I found she was engaging and exceptionally kind. But the music won me over first, and it is the music to which I return.

            Kater’s latest single, “Parallels” is in some ways a long way from her first EP of traditional tunes, “Old Soul” — it features trumpet player Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, for one  — but Kater’s lyrics works just as well over the smooth jazz horn and soft drums as over banjo and bass. I know that at some point in a few months, I’ll find myself up at 1 or 2 am, letting “Paralells” wrap around me in the quiet of the night.