Katherine Paul album featured in Rolling Stone

As a popular song says, there are few ways better to gain fame than to have your picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

A La Conner singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist may not be on the iconic magazine’s cover, but she is featured on its digital pages as an artist readers need to know.

Locally and regionally, Katherine Paul, the face of Black Belt Eagle Scout, needs no introductions.

Her brand is now getting plenty of national exposure, thanks to a glowing profile penned for rollingstone.com by Philadelphia-based writer, editor and producer Sam Yellowhorse Kelser.

The Kelser piece on Paul, daughter of civic leaders Kevin and Pat Paul, was published last month. Focus of the article is the musician’s latest album “The Land, The Water, The Sky,” recorded in Anacortes. It is a celebration of her homecoming.

Paul alludes to the Skagit Bay area feeling like medicine and that residing here allows her to be close to treasured family and friends.

Paul also embraces an extended family that now includes fans of her indigenous-themed music, which has been picked up by the TV show “Reservation Dogs.”

Paul has thanked co-creator and showrunner Sterlin Harjo for including her music in a pivotal sequence in the season finale of the popular FX series.

“I was like, ‘Sterlin, thank you so much,” she said in the Rolling Stone interview. “This is awesome.”

Which also pretty much describes how Paul feels about her local roots.

“It almost sort of seems wrong,” she told Kelser, “not to live here.”

“This album,” Paul told Kelser, “is about the journey back home – moving back and then figuring out who I am and this new phase of being an adult in my homelands.”

A Swinomish Indian Tribal Community member, Paul and husband Camas Logue returned here after years of being part of the Portland music and arts scenes.

Paul has since run for a seat on the Swinomish Tribal Senate and made a presentation on local Pride Day events before the La Conner Town Council.

Public service and community involvement come naturally to Paul, known fondly to family members as Lady K.

Paul’s mom, an attorney, was president of the Skagit County Historical Society in 2021.

Her dad, a 1979 La Conner High School graduate, is an internationally renowned master carver, former Swinomish senator and now a La Conner Swinomish Library board member. He and Logue last year completed work on the story pole installed at its Morris Street main entrance.