Storm Large And Pink Martini Are Heading To Kravis Center March 3 And This Smooth Show Is Best Served Live

By Joanie Cox Henry

She's ferociously funny, and armed with one of the most astonishing voices in music. Storm Large doesn't just walk into a room. She transforms it. As she prepares to bring Pink Martini to the Kravis Center on March 3, the inimitable singer sits down South Florida Concert News to talk wolves, Romania, AI, and much more.

Storm Large is six feet tall, has a voice that could shatter cathedral glass or cradle a lullaby. She is, in person and in spirit, exactly what her name suggests, a force of nature that arrives with full atmospheric pressure and leaves the landscape permanently rearranged.

On March 3, she'll bring the voice, the wit, the barely-contained anarchic joy and her vivaciousness to the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, as the lead vocalist on Pink Martini's ongoing world tour. And if you're not already holding a ticket, the question you should already be asking yourself is: why on earth not?

THE LANGUAGE OF SOULS

When I ask Storm whether there's a language among the 25-plus in Pink Martini's repertoire where something almost spiritual happens when she sings, there's no hesitation whatsoever.

"Romanian. One thousand percent," she emphatically states.

She traces the connection partly to DNA. A recent blood test revealed she's 17% Ashkenazi Jewish, which she received with characteristic delight. "That makes total sense. I do love the borscht," Large revealed.

But there's another fascinating layer to her story. Growing up, Storm Large's greatest ambition was to be bitten by a werewolf. Not metaphorically. Literally. "Because I love wolves," she explains, with the serene conviction of someone who has never once questioned this. "Wolves are better than people."

It seems Romania, land of wolves and mystery and Romani folklore, called to her long before Pink Martini handed her the language to sing in. And when the band finally performed there in a small town called Cluj, in a packed high school auditorium, something happened that she still struggles to fully articulate.

"I start singing the song, and it was like they were holding their breath," Storm Large says, her voice dropping. "You couldn't hear a squeak of a chair. They were just transfixed. And then when I finished the first chorus, the place exploded with screaming, howling, shaking. People were weeping. They couldn't believe it."

She pauses. "Music as an art is far more powerful a diplomatic action than any stupid guy in a suit talking about jobs. It's like, we fancy American people come to your small town and we're going to look you in the eye and tell you: you're beautiful. What you have made here is beautiful. We honor you."

THE VOICE THAT BUILT ITSELF

Here is the remarkable thing about Storm Large's voice. Almost none of it was formally trained. For most of her career, she simply willed herself toward the sounds she wanted to make, pushing muscularly into notes that weren't yet hers. "I hurt myself a thousand times," she admits cheerfully. In her twenties, she was losing her voice constantly until she found a vocal therapist named Raz Kennedy who taught her, essentially, how not to destroy the instrument she'd been recklessly playing.

The analogy she reaches for is characteristically Storm: "When you're a singer and you're smoking, it's kind of like being a ballet dancer who says, 'I'm so stressed out, I just need to beat myself with a baseball bat to calm down.' It's the stupidest thing you've ever heard of." She quit smoking. She kept the coffee.

These days she works occasionally with pop vocal coach Douglas Peck who she describes as "a beautiful human with the deepest, wildest knowledge of the human voice" and only just began formal voice lessons in the past year. This, for one of the most celebrated voices in contemporary American cabaret and rock. The voice, it seems, has its own self-taught genius.

ON WOLVES, WEREWOLVES, AND WHAT INSPIRES HER

Storm Large's list of musical inspirations reads like the most thrillingly eclectic dinner party ever conceived. Patti Smith and the Ramones. Tom Waits and the Sex Pistols. Poet Andrea Gibson. And then, in the same breath, with genuine reverence: Olivia Rodrigo. Billie Eilish. Neko Case.

"Olivia Rodrigo is a genius," she says flatly. "So is Billie Eilish. She's a brilliant writer and so funny." Of Neko Case, whose recent book she insists you read immediately, she says with an incredulous kind of love: "Is there anything she's not amazing at?"

As for dream collaborations, the list is equally cool. Storm says she'd love to sing with Neko Case, with Brandi Carlile, with Chuck D — "I would just vocalize behind whatever poetry he wanted to spit out." She also admits she'd love to collaborate with Nick Cave. And, perhaps most perfectly, she has a standing fantasy of writing a gloriously stupid punk-rock love song with Dave Grohl. "A hilarious love song where we get into a fight and make out with a bloody nose," she explains, with absolute earnestness. Someone please make this happen.

Currently, she's deep in a new one-woman show, opening in June, and the book that will inevitably follow it. She's also been absorbing the work of a British spoken-word artist named Ren, whose pointedly political, personally vulnerable poetry has been seeping into her own writing. "Very personal, vulnerable, really, really good," she says. "He's inspiring me a lot right now."

Writing on the road, though, is its own particular struggle. "It's like going from being a dog to being a cat," she says. "It's hard to turn that outside light on and then turn it off and go inside." The performing self and the writing self, it turns out, are very different creatures. Storm Large contains multitudes and she keeps excellent track of all of them.

DON'T TALK TO HER ABOUT AI

There are few topics on which Storm Large has more feelings than artificial intelligence, and she arrives at the subject with the same full-body commitment she brings to everything else. Her concern isn't abstract. She worries specifically about AI being used to replicate artists' voices and writing styles without consent, creating content that audiences might mistake for the real thing. It's a devastatingly real concern for all humans in 2026. "They'll find all my interviews, all my articles, copy my voice, and write something you'd think I wrote," she says. "It's gross."

She uses AI tools herself for research, for information-gathering, even for asking questions she finds genuinely fascinating, like when she asked her AI assistant to walk her through the scenario in which artificial intelligence eventually comes for us all. "I said, 'Would you warn me?'" she reports, with obvious delight at her own audacity.

But the broader trajectory worries her deeply, particularly the replacement of human interaction with automated systems. She tells a story about arriving at an airport café, sitting down at a bar full of iPads, placing one face-down so she could talk to an actual person, and being told by the human employee that she had to order from the iPad. "I said, 'Do you like your job?' And she said she had a couple of jobs. And I said, 'Well, you won't have this one for very long if you're teaching us not to need you.'"

Near the end of our conversation, I ask Storm what advice she would give to her younger self. She doesn't hesitate.

"You belong here. You deserve this. It's a lot of hard work, but you are absolutely allowed to do this, and you're good enough to do it," Large adds.

On March 3, she'll be at the Kravis Center. She hasn't seen the set list yet. "It's always a surprise," she says with a grin, but that's also half the magic. With Storm Large, you never quite know what's coming. You only know it's going to be extraordinary.

Pink Martini featuring Storm Large and Jimmie Herrod performs at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, West Palm Beach, on Tuesday March 3. For tickets, visit kravis.org.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5jAasj5PYo