Dayna Kurtz   Another Black Feather

Biography

In April of last year, New Jersey native Dayna Kurtz escaped to the desert to write the songs for her fourth album.  "I completed most of the songs for Another Black Feather in a hermitage maintained by some lovely people for solitary religious introspection.  I stayed in an adobe hut on 500 acres in the Sonoran desert in Arizona.  There was no electricity, nobody around for miles, a cot, a table, chair and pitcher.  2 weeks.  I brought no distractions – no novels, only books of writing exercises and poetry.  It was so quiet at night I could hear the blood beat in my ears. It was sublime, and I wrote constantly.  When I wasn't writing I'd take a walk, stop and watch a bug climbing around a desert flower for an hour. I learned a lot about my friends when I described this trip to them, and showed them pictures.   My artist/writer/musician friends were mostly envious.  But some people looked at the hut and said, 'Is that a dirt floor?'”  

Making the album came just as easily.  "We recorded the basics live to tape, 2 or 3 takes per song, and picked the best of 'em right then.  I love analog.  When you record digitally it just requires too much imagination to hear how good it might sound when you've overdubbed, mixed and mastered.  When you record to tape, it sounds like a record right out of the gate.  It helped us make decisions faster – we just knew when it was good or great or bad, not based on the perfection of performance, but based on overall vibe.”  

“It was the best of both worlds; the warmth and immediacy of analog with the final flexibility of pro-tools.  I'm never recording any other way again.”

Co-producing the album with Dayna was Randy Crafton, who has worked with Dayna on all 3 of her studio albums.  Some of the musicians who helped Dayna bring her songs to life include her long-time back up band, bassist Dave Richards and keyboard/accordionist Peter Vitalone, the singer-songwriter Malcolm Holcombe, Matt Darriau and Frank London from the Klezmatics, Jorge Alfano (charango), Rob Curto (accordion), and Danny Bensi, Saunder Jurriaans and Gregory Rogove from the band Tarantula AD.     

"Dave, Randy, Pete and I are turning into a really crack studio machine lately. Both Randy and Dave have started families in the last couple of years, so they really can't get on the road with me all that often anymore.  It's made us really appreciate our time in the studio that much more.  They're family now, and we play like it.   They know my quirks as a player so well that we barely have to discuss what's going on, they're just right there. I played a lot of lap steel for the first time on this record.  It's a completely different feel than regular old slide guitar - you have to keep it very simple, to the point, and it's unforgiving on intonation.  I keep on wanting to invent studio projects for us so I don't have to wait till I've written an album full of songs to get back there with them.  I want to find someone who wants us as a backing band, so I can just play lap steel guitar for hours with these guys.  I wish we could be Booker T and the MG's, and find our Bill Withers to produce and back up."

Following in the footsteps of the diverse Beautiful Yesterday, Another Black Feather finds Dayna leaning more heavily on her roots and country influences than usual, in particular making generous use of her new lap steel guitar, and showcasing her prodigious slide work on other songs. "One of the things that I seem to encounter constantly is that I don't really quite fit anywhere," observes Dayna Kurtz.   Asked by a European journalist what her music was 'made of', Dayna replied, "If you're at the flea market, you walk past all the fine old antiques and the cheap designer knockoff clothing from China, past the used German leather jackets, and over in the back is an old man with a battered tweed hat who has some blankets on the ground covered with old toasters and a pair of ladies knickers from the 50's, a snow globe from the 1992 Olympic games, and a box of old men's watches and broken reading glasses and teaspoons.  I'll be picking through there."

The lack of a ready stylistic tag hasn't stopped the resourceful performer from building a substantial audience—and a compelling body of recorded work—on her own terms. She maintains an enthusiastic international fan base that's embraced the poetic passion of her songwriting and the communicative power of her voice, an unforgettable, distinctly husky instrument that's capable of immense depth and sensitivity.  She has also inspired reams of rapturous acclaim from critics and won admiration from her musical peers.

Dayna Kurtz began performing her original compositions in public as a teenager, and subsequently spent the better part of a decade touring solo across the back roads of America, selling CD's out of her trunk and mesmerizing club and festival crowds with her riveting live performances. Along the way, she opened shows for the likes of Richie Havens (who became a fan and lent guest vocals to her debut studio album, Postcards from Downtown).  

The last few years has found Dayna winning over new fans in the New York City music scene.  In the past two years she has been invited to open up for Rufus Wainwright, Antony & the Johnsons, and Keren Ann.  Additionally, Dayna has won over fellow "Living Room" habitué Norah Jones, who sings a duet with Dayna on "I Got It Bad…" (From Beautiful Yesterday).  Outside of her new hometown, the legendary Richard Thompson invited Dayna to open up for a coast-to-coast nationwide tour that found Dayna converting some of his faithful fans. 

The fan response and critical attention generated by Kurtz's grass roots touring efforts inevitably drew interest from the mainstream music industry. Despite her indie status, Dayna has found an enthusiastic audience, winning high-profile guest spots on such radio shows as World Cafe, Mountain Stage and NPR's Morning Edition. But nowhere has the interest in Dayna's music been more pronounced than in Holland, where Dayna's debut studio album soared into the top 20 of the album charts on the strength of the hit single "Love Gets in the Way".  In the summer of 2003, Dayna went from performing in front of 50 people at the Living Room in New York City's lower east side, to headlining the fabled Paradiso theatre in Amsterdam in front of 1000 people in what would be her first of many sold out shows in the Netherlands in the months to follow.  Dayna has since then discovered a larger audience in Europe, and this spring alone will find her in Greece, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the UK.  

But Dayna Kurtz has worked too hard to allow such adulation to go to her head. "Every step I've taken has felt really organic, and like they've been made at the right time," she states, adding, "The records I've made feel like honest expressions of where I'm at musically, and the making of them has been joyful and interesting."

"Besides, every musician should feel like a rock star in at least one country."

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contact: Carla Parisi Carla@tijuanagiftshop.net or Jeff Kilgour jeff@tijuanagiftshop.net at Tijuana Gift Shop, 973-846-0041

about some of the songs:

nola: i wrote this one way before katrina. from the first time i stepped foot in that city, on my very first southern tour, i wanted to live there. it felt wrong to live anywhere else. something always kept me from moving, finances, love. but she always kind of haunted me. my days off on tour always centered around time in new orleans, and they’d always get longer and longer, and i’d always want to cry when i left. i love new york, it’s my home, but when it pissed me off i saw my town as toxic lover. new york is a man, definitely – beautiful, charming and cold hearted. new orleans is a beautiful mysterious woman, an old school femme fatale, who wraps us around her little finger till we can’t think straight. the song is every longing i’ve ever had to abandon nyc and move there.

it’s the day of atonement, 2001

this one began as a poem i wrote on yom kippor, the jewish day of atonement, or forgiveness, a couple of weeks after 9/11. nyc was a pretty solemn place. yom kippor is a pretty solemn holiday. the second half was written 3 years later at the same time of year. the selfish, violent, misguided things being done in every god’s name lately really piss me off. so i saw some of these gods like a suburban family, reacting to the situation like a suburban family might – mohommed the sullen, angry adolescent boy, jesus the weepy, sensitive teenage girl, and yahweh/allah, the exhausted, sighing, jewish mother.

venezuela this was a dream i had, top to bottom. nothing was altered in any way. it was lucid, i knew i was dreaming, and in it i woke up in venezuela, and a man in old fashioned clothes told me he waited all his life for me to come to his dream and that we’re meant to marry. he’d asked permission of my father....and i became really sad – because i knew i had to tell him i was spoken for in another dream. the way i showed him was by opening up my shirt, and there was just a rib cage with a paper heart dangling from a fish hook, and i pointed to it and said ‘see? my real heart is in the other dream’

banks of the edisto the edisto is a beautiful black river in south carolina. (it’s black because the cypress trees lining the banks have tannin in the roots and they dye the water like tea. it’s quite clean) i knew an amazing man there – he and his wife lived on that river their whole lives, knew it like the back of their hands, and i used to visit them when i was passing near on tour. he was a bit of a character, big handle bar mustache, big hearted, with beautiful kind eyes. we’d sit on the dock and pass his banjo back and forth. i loved the sound so much i bought one right before stopping visiting one tim. it needed work, and he was kind of a tinkerer – so he suggested we trade banjos, he’d fix mine and play it till i passed thru again and we’d re-trade. i never saw him again though. he was fighting cancer at the time and he lost. when i found out he died i had his banjo with me and i wrote the song. i feel like it was a gift from him.

from the bottom up when i met my husband, i wasn’t really sure my songwriting career would survive a healthy relationship. i’d gotten a lot of creative mileage out of really tortured and dysfunctional affairs. as it was, i barely picked up a pen for the first couple of years we were together, but it mostly didn’t bother me, as i was too damned happy. this was the first song to come out after that time. it’s kind of about love, writer’s block, and the music business.

The first time I saw Dayna Kurtz sing was a Sunday night in winter, bitter cold, a lousy slot for live music, frankly, and it showed. There were five people at the little bar where she was playing, and four of them had just ordered dinner. I was there because I’d just bought Dayna’s second record, Postcards from Downtown, and I couldn’t get the damn thing off my stereo. I had 3000 CDs. I was a Registered Music Geek. I went through albums like a lumberjack through pancakes. But this one had me bad, all sunk in the deep latitudes of sex and woe. Her voice had turned my heart spooky with lust.

So there I was, front and center, in this empty dump of a bar and Dayna got up on this dinky little stage and started singing and it was one those moments you don’t forget. It was just her and the guitar, no fancy arrangements, and her throat was sore from the road, but the entire place was filled, instantly, with her deep, human trembling.

The quartet at the table were there for the burgers, a couple of guys in ties and their dates and really, I had nothing against them – except they wouldn’t shut up. There was this one guy in particular (always is) and he couldn’t just talk to his date. He had to shout. It was the shouting of a man whose better impulses have run dry, who has only rage and volume. I finally turned to him and told him to shut up. But he went on and on, yelling about television shows and health products and the ungrateful poor.

Dayna kept singing. She had every right to stop, pull the plug, blow town. But she gave herself to those songs, fully and without embarrassment. She sounded like Billy Holliday and Leonard Cohen crooning into the same mic, and the strummed melodies were lush and hypnotic, full of the complicated joy of sorrow.

Afterwards, I went and tried to explain to her what I didn’t have words for yet, how brave and vulnerable her songs made me feel, how they made me forget to breathe, so I just stood there and apologized for the jerk.

Dayna shrugged. “Assholes gotta eat, too,” she said.

I helped her lug her stuff outside to her car. Except there was no car. It had been towed. Here, Dayna broke down a little. She had just come from a festival where she played for 700 fans and got to take a hot tub with Greg Brown and here she was in Cambridge, in the biting cold, with a psycho fan and no money and no car.

“Fuck,” she said, beginning, quietly, to weep. “This is so fucked up.”

In the end, we took my car to Pat’s towing and Dayna paid 95 dollars cash and we got her aimed back toward Brooklyn. But I’ve never forgotten that night. It managed to convey everything you need to know about America in these times: our aggressive disdain for art, for those who commit the unpardonable crime of making us feel more than we wish to feel. The ludicrous sacrifices to be endured by these criminals. And how one might, in the darkest moments, turn to the art itself for redemption.

Dayna did her gig. She delivered her songs to that room with astonishing grace. She got herself home. She lived to sing another day.

The most compelling evidence being the disc you hold in your very hands.

I’m not going to burden you with a bunch of song titles and fancy adjectives. They are but husks before the harvest.

I will say this, though: I got Another Black Feather two weeks ago.

I have yet to listen to anything else.

You’ll see what I mean presently.

-- Steve Almond, Somerville, MA 2006