How Neyla Pekarek is making a name for herself in Denver and beyond

By Monica Parpal Stockbridge

Thirst sat down with Neyla Pekarek in April of 2020 while the 34-year-old musician was experiencing a pandemic-driven downtime from her usual frenetic schedule. Here, we share some of her thoughts and experiences since departing from The Lumineers, and what’s next in her artistic career.

Pekarek is a true local, having grown up in Aurora and earned her music education degree from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. After graduating, she taught for the Littleton Public School District as a substitute teacher for two years.

“I actually had a really good gig, as I could kind of be with the same kids and I knew how to run a rehearsal which was helpful,” she says. “It was also a perfect job to have when I first started touring because I could come back home and have a job all the time, which was really nice.”

The touring she’s referring to was with the band, The Lumineers. She was 23 when she joined the burgeoning group as their cello player. The Lumineers became a sensation, and while Pekarek was with the band it wasn’t unusual to tour for 600 days during a two-year timeframe. She says her 20s was a good time for such an adventure. “It’s a good time for young people to travel and that kind of thing and figure themselves out. I just sort of fell into this and it became my career.”

Some of the highlights? Playing Saturday Night Live, playing for President Obama at the White House and traveling to every continent on the plant (except Antarctica). She played and toured with the band for eight years. “I went from crashing with friends and living from couch to couch to then all of the sudden being able to really be fully financially independent.”

While grateful for the opportunity, Pekarek says that the band never felt like her own project. “I wasn’t part of the writing process and I really wanted to start writing my own songs. I wanted to take hold of my own destiny.”

Around 2015 to 2016 while touring on The Lumineers’ album, Cleopatra, she felt a surge of creative energy and began seriously writing her own material. Whenever she had a few days off, she would go into the studio and chip away at a record. “I loved writing and I loved singing and doing the things that I wasn’t really doing in The Lumineers. And it just felt like I had outgrown it a little bit and was ready for something different.”

Pekarek departed from The Lumineers in 2018 and began to pursue her own creative project — Rattlesnake Kate.

“I had known about this story for a long time and it always felt like it lent itself to a book or play or songs,” she says, referring to a historic Colorado woman, Kate McHale Slaughterback, famous for encountering and killing 140 rattlesnakes to protect herself and her young son. Pekarek began writing songs for fun. “I found it to be really therapeutic,” she says. But Rattlesnake Kate quickly became her central muse. While researching Kate, Pekarek learned that the figure was tough, outspoken and stubborn. “I admired that a lot, and it sort of helped me find my own voice and my own courage to be who I wanted to be.”

Pekarek, a lover of musical theater, had long thought that Rattlesnake Kate would make a great musical. As she wrote the record, she felt like she was hiding a secret musical inside a mainstream record, which was released in January 2019.

Even before the record came out, officials at the Denver Center for Performing Arts agreed to commission Pekarek’s work into a stage musical. Pekarek presented the concept as a concert during the 2019 Colorado New Play Summit, then spent the next 18 months developing her work into a stage musical, working with playwright Karen Hartman and Chris Coleman, DCPA’s artistic director.

“It’s been really incredible figuring out how to piece this together and tell [Rattlesnake Kate’s] story, and watching other people get really excited and enamored by her,” Pekarek says. “I’m working with so many other awesome creative people that I feel like the collaboration has been really positive.”

As Pekarek reflects on her own journey, she feels that Rattlesnake Kate is an important story to tell. “I made a record that was about feeling heard and about trying to stand your ground, which is not always an easy thing for a woman in any industry,” she says. “It’s not always what we’re encouraged to do.”

The musical had been slated to premiere in February of 2021, during the 2020-2021 DCPA season. In a heartbreaking turn of events, the entire theatre company season — including Rattlesnake Kate — was cancelled, due to safety concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My heart is heavy over the cancellation at the DCPA,” she says. “I am trying to have realistic expectations, but also remain hopeful.” Still, she says that the arts will still be important as we look to the future. “I think people are really going to need things like theater and music and art when we come out of this.”

The future is uncertain, but Pekarek remains optimistic, drawing upon her muse’s remarkable resilience.

“Rattlesnake Kate was about as resilient as they come, surviving a rattlesnake encounter, the 1918 flu pandemic, six marriages and being struck by lightning; here’s hoping her resilience prevails once again.”

Monica Parpal Stockbridge writes about food, travel and technology in Colorado and beyond. Read more of her work at monicastockbridge.com.