Natalia Zukerman with Nervous But Excited
7:30 p.m. Sept. 16
The Ark, Ann Arbor
http://www.nataliazukerman.com
Natalia Zukerman plays the hell out of the guitar. What, exactly, she plays isn't clear. Call it folk, if you will. Or rock. Or jazz. Or blues. Or folking bluesy jazz-rock.
What you call it isn't important to Zukerman. She's not aiming for any one genre; she's just channeling the music that comes through her.
Music is, after all, in her blood. She's the daughter of violinist/conductor Pinchas Zukerman and flutist/writer Eugenia Zukerman, who she cites as her biggest musical influences.
"Just knowing (music) was going to be a part of my life definitely comes from them," she says as she sits sipping an iced coffee in the backyard of her Newburyport, Mass., home. Cuteworld, USA, she calls it. "It's just a very sweet little Norman Rockwell-painting sort of town." Zukerman moved there from Brooklyn in order to be with her girlfriend, singer/songwriter Melissa Ferrick.
"In good ways and bad, I was forced to play an instrument from an early age," she says. "It was required in my house, like chores."
So young Natalia picked up the violin – but she never quite settled into it. As she got older, she started listening to the Grateful Dead, and then singer/songwriter music in the vein of Joni Mitchell. But in high school, things started to click. Discovering artists like Tracy Chapman, Susanne Vega and Shawn Colvin gave her a much better idea of the kind of music she'd like to play. Not that she really sounds like any of them. But still, she was on the right track.
One thing Zukerman definitely wanted to avoid was what she calls "Diary Rock." "It's a difficult thing to avoid," she admits. "You're writing from your experiences, but (the goal is) to really try to take it out from your own personal view and try to put a more universal spin on it."
While she often starts writing with a personal anecdote or feeling, "I try to describe what it looks like more than what it feels like."
Her rule? "If it has a lot of proper nouns in it, it's a good song," she jokes. Trying to avoid words like "pain" and "mad" and "sad" is key. Show, don't tell, as all good writers strive to do.
Not that she's a lyric-elitist. "I like good music of all kinds, so if you're saying, 'I'm sad and things are bad and you make me mad' but you're playing the shit out of the guitar, I'm probably going to like it," she says. "But I try to challenge myself in my writing to try to stay away from things like that and really try to describe things in a little bit of a bigger way, even though I might just be mad and sad and feeling bad."
It's not surprising that chops alone could win Zukerman over. For a long time, she wrote her songs' chops first, lyrics second. For her latest album, which she is in the process of recording, she's trying to turn things around a bit.
"I've definitely been trying to write a little bit without the guitar because I've definitely relied heavily on the music coming first," she says. "I start vocalizing a little bit and the words will come a little bit later."
Ironically, lately Zukerman finds herself sitting with her journal and writing lyrics. Songs don't come as readily as they used to. "It's not as easy as it once was. When I first started writing songs I was right out of college and I had a lot of young 20s stuff going on. Now I don't have as much drama in my life, thank God."
That's not to say she's losing her touch. More accurately, she's maturing as a songwriter. "It's less of a cathartic process now," she says, "so I try to approach (the craft) and give myself challenges."
Trying to find an accurate comparison for Zukerman is difficult. She says she's been compared to everyone from Joni Mitchell to Michelle Shocked to Jewel. "I appreciate all of (the comparisons)," she says. It lets people get inside her own music that much faster.
And if you're still trying to figure out what to call Zukerman's music, stop. Now.
