A Dayna life -- musically
Sunday, August 01, 2004
BY JAY LUSTIG
Star-Ledger Staff

With her deep voice, her calm, deliberate delivery and her air of mystery, Dayna Kurtz is a young singer-songwriter-guitarist who is not quite like any other young singer-songwriter-guitarist.

This Matawan native and current Brooklyn resident, who seems to savor every word she sings, established herself as a songwriter with her two prior releases, 2000's "Otherwise Luscious Life" (a live album) and 2002's "Postcards From Downtown." Here, she sticks mainly to song interpretation, covering everything from Prince's enigmatic "Joy In Repetition" to Leonard Cohen's dark, wickedly funny "Everybody Knows."

She strips the kitsch from Mary Hopkin's nostalgic 1968 hit "Those Were the Days" and embraces the melancholy of Billie Holiday's "Left Alone." Norah Jones joins her for a warm, low-key duet on Duke Ellington's "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)," and the string quartet Ethel appears on three tracks.

Some of the album's most obscure covers are stunning.

Kurtz found "Lost and Looking," an elegant blues song, on Sam Cooke's 1963 album, "Night Beat." "I Belong To the Wind," a non-hit for someone named Wendy Huber in the 1960s, is the determined, defiant anthem of a free spirit.

"Take your love, I'm not for loving/Take your needs, I'm not for needing/Take your tears, I'm not for crying/I belong to the wind," Kurtz declares, with the Ethel strings sighing and soaring behind her.

Kurtz turns to one of her contemporaries, Eszter Balint, for "Amsterdam Crown," a song with a lazy roots-rock ambience and an unexpectedly rousing chorus. If enough people ever heard it, it could be a hit.

Only three of the album's 12 songs are originals. One, the title track, has a clunky beat and a fussy, forced feel. But "Love, Where Did You Go" is a haunting look at a wounded lover, and "Music Box" -- written from the point of view of a music box -- is an offbeat dazzler.

This music box has some very human-sounding problems. "Sitting in the same room, over and over/Listening to the same songs, over again/And if I could say one thing, I'd tell Time that he's a bastard/To wind you up and watch you run in circles, till you fade away," sings Kurtz.

Kurtz performs at Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette St., N.Y., at 7 p.m. Thursday. Tickets are $12 in advance or $15 at the door; call (212) 239-6200 or visit www.joespub.com.