Karli Fairbanks is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, engineer and recording artist with an active career spanning two decades and half a dozen bands. As a child she was so drawn to music that she begged her parents for piano lessons. After years spent studying piano via the Suzuki method, she switched to guitar to transition to learning more more popular music on an instrument more conducive to transport and accessibility.
As high school class valedictorian, brutally averse to public speaking, she requested to perform a song at graduation in lieu of a speech. (Much less scary.) The request was granted and her songwriting journey began. It was, you could say, a terrible song. Nonetheless, it began a journey into creative self expression that no other art form has quite held a candle to.
Over twenty years later, Karli’s music has existed in near complete obscurity. A hidden gem of the Pacific Northwest music scene, a staple music organizer of her hometown, Spokane…and a bastion of a life committed to the creative work of making music for love and joy no matter the results. Her catalogue of songwriting explores the themes of all the lives lived along the way.
Welcome to the comprehensive history of those lives.
The album-opening “Good Dream” almost feels like Fairbanks having an out-of-body experience looking down on herself and filtering her observations through an ethereal dream pop folk lens. Tunes like “Let It Go Free” radiate with a warm Americana embrace of creative optimism, while there are also plenty of doses of more stripped-down sweet melancholy on tracks like “Bittersweet and “What Did I Give.”
-The Inlander
Windoe, the solo project of local artist Karli Ingersoll, releases her new EP “Meditations on Grief” on Oct. 15. The EP pivots in sound and composition from Ingersoll’s previous album, moving toward t …
-The Spokesman Review
At 10 tracks and only about 36 minutes long, the album is a lesson in how to sound efficiently epic. Crunchy electric guitar powers songs like “Wild Thing” and “Standing Still,” while “Take It Easy” crackles with the warm hum of strummed acoustic guitar strings. “I Had a Dream” floats woozily across an expanse of open space. “Deliver Us” shimmers like arena-ready pop even as it tackles dark subject matter. And album closer “Secret Keeper” sounds like Big Thief playing the slightly surf-y slow-dance song at a ’60s high school prom.
-The Inlander
My very first album… written, produced, recorded and mixed by me with the help of my friends, Joel Smith, Caroline Fowler, Scott Ellis, and Zac Fairbanks. Cover art by Erin Wenz.
I produced and engineered this EP for very good friends in Seattle Washington. After self-recording and producing my first album several of my friends brought me in to do the same for them. I love making records and this one we had a lot of fun with.
I produced and engineered this Ep for my friend, Noah in Spokane, Washington. I also sang some vocals on the EP and designed the artwork.
My second EP was very stripped down versions of a handful of songs. It was released with very limited production and not online. Produced and engineered by Kory Kruckenberg.
My second solo album, produced and engineered by Kory Kruckenberg in Seattle. I was working really hard at songwriting and trying to expand my sonic and lyrical vocabulary on this album.
These songs were B-sides from my recording time with Kory Kruckenberg. They had a little bit more of a dark energy and we saved them for a separate EP. This album never made it onto the internet and there was only a couple hundred copies made into CD.
A very fun project with Caroline Fowler, Anna Baer, Sarah Moyer. I played accordion, guitar and sang. I also contributed to the songwriting, production and engineering. The EP was mixed by Caleb Ingersoll.
After I released my 2nd solo album in 2009 I really felt burnt out. I wanted to just play music with friends and have a more collaborative creative experience. I started Cathedral Pearls in 2010 with my partner and our friends Max and Carrie Harnishfeger.
Cathedral Pearls was a successful project creatively and we were named one of the top 10 bands to listen to by Paste magazine in 2012. We played shows around the northwest and released our 2nd EP.
In 2013 Max and I participated in the RPM project, a global project where musicians write and record a whole album in the month of February. The result was this heartwarming EP.
After several years taking a break from my solo career I decided to pick back up again under a different moniker. I was married and had changed my last name from Fairbanks. Windoe was born.
After 5 years of writing and performing we put a full album together. I’m really proud of the writing on this album and how hard we all worked to create these tunes. Cathedral Pearls was a fun challenge for me to write with a more indie-rock voice and Etchings is the pinnacle of that effort for me.
A new collection of solo tunes emerged for me in 2017. I toured a bit with these songs and still really love them. There’s a lot of angst in these tunes following the first Trump presidency. I was mad at where I saw us heading, how I felt responsible and the terror of what was ahead.
I started another band in 2015/2016…another effort to collaborate and enjoy playing music with friends. This time I wanted to make pop/soul music so I called on Max Harnishfeger and Scott Ingersoll. Our first EP is still a delight to me.
My 3rd solo album under the moniker Windoe is about reclaiming the creative process of music. For ten years I had been writing, recording, performing and often felt like I was releasing music into the void of the internet. But I always came back because I love it. The great prize of this work is the joy of showing up over and over again.
My band Super Sparkle continued to have a successful run in the pacific northwest. Capping a wonderful 5 years of joy we released this EP produced by Max Harnishfeger.
I co-produced and co-wrote a few songs on Natalie Closner’s solo EP, Fresh Water In An Empty Vase. This was a really joyful project to work on during quarantined pandemic times.
An EP about grief I wrote, recorded and engineered. These songs emerged beginning in 2019 after a deep betrayal and great loss that sent me into a tailspin. This EP was a way to process and show myself tenderness.
I co-wrote the song “Waves Crash” on Joseph’s 4th studio album, The Sun. The song came from Natalie’s desire to separate from the confines of sin and judgement heaped on her through a fundamentalist christian upbringing. I found comparing how morally neutral nature is to be helpful. At our worst are we worse than a crashing wave? Beautiful and powerful and dangerous? Does that make us bad? It doesn’t make a wave bad. It just is.
My fourth full length solo album Stay Radiant was independently released on July 11th of 2025. I’m so proud to be releasing music again as myself, full circle. This album means to much to me. Produced, engineered, and written by myself, Max Harnishfeger and Justin Landis. Mixed by Max Harnishfeger.
I co-wrote the song “I Can Feel My Own Hands” on Joseph’s 5th studio album, Closer to Happy. This song came to us in a moment of tenderness. Feeling desire for healing and knowing no one is coming to do it for you. You are the gentle, kind voice and gesture of love. Your hands are the ones there to lift you up.
An excerpt from my newsletter.
The odd thing about the creative life is that no one makes you show up. No clocking in and out, no one making sure you are logging billable hours or sending off your work on time. There isn’t even any sort of contract that says if you put in time and make things, you’ll get paid for it. With visual art, I find it makes a bit more sense because you have a physical good you are selling or even a design that will be used over and over like a logo to define an idea or business. We can palette that kind of value. It mostly makes sense. You buy a greeting card for $5 because why would greeting cards be free?
In my different roles in the music industry over the years, I have over and over wondered…“why are they/we doing this?” Why are all these musicians showing up, playing their music, forking over thousands of dollars from their own pockets (or going into massive debt) to record albums. Aside from a binding record contract, no one is making them show up to work to create or continue on this path. Maybe it’s just pure ego and the American dream of fame and fortune. Yet there are hundreds of small bands who embark on this journey without a care for fame or success. What are they after? What are all of us searching for? What is driving this seemingly endless effort of shoving our hearts into the ether through craft and creativity?
Today I uploaded a 13 song album to get mastered. It’s the final step in the music production process. Polishing the sonic wave forms to be as balanced and tidy as possible. t’s kind of like the framing or varnishing of the painting.
I started this project almost two years ago. I had gone through a breakup that led to a ton of change in my life and I had been writing a LOT of songs because that’s just what I do, especially in crisis. My last music releases were in 2019 and 2021 as Windoe (the moniker I used while I was married). I knew I wanted to start putting some of my new songs into recorded form and I knew I wanted to work with Max Harnishfeger (AKA Water Monster), my former bandmate in Super Sparkle and Cathedral Pearls. I love how Max thinks and feels about music. It resonates with me. We decided to just start working song by song because we were both really busy and tackling an album felt impossible.