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 the record two weeks ago.

I have yet to listen to anything else.

You’ll see what I mean presently.

-- Steve Almond, Somerville, MA 2006