Erin McKeown
8 p.m. Oct. 25
The Ark, Ann Arbor
Screw that "Live from New York" label. Erin McKeown wanted something more avant-garde for her debut live disc, "Lafayette." Something that other artists recording outside of the studio in the Big Apple hadn't already used.
Then – it hit her. Joe's Pub, where the album was recorded, is in New York. On Lafayette. Ah: Mission accomplished.
Though the album spans her nearly-decade-long career over 13 songs, don't expect any in-between song confessionals or wisecracks. It's just music. And music. And more music.
"I wanted the record to flow more like a studio record," McKeown says from North Carolina, where she's visiting a friend. "I didn't want there to be a lot of talking or jokes or stories – which of course you would get if you went to my live show. But I think that kind of stuff wears out very quickly on a record."
Fan-fave "We Are More" made the album. Her muse for it: Joseph Cornell, whose decorated surrealist-inspired shadow boxes in the '30s and '40s dealt with memories. While reading a book about him, McKeown was deciding what to take away from a recent break-up. She thought: "OK, I'm about to put this relationship in a box and put it on the shelf, as we all do when we move on. What do I want to remember? What do I want to collect and assemble and put in this box?"
The song became her box – focusing on the pros of their relationship and purposefully neglecting to shine light on any of the wreckage. "I wanted to remember the relationship as it had been in a good way as opposed to all the things that led to its downfall," she says.
Though "Lafayette" is McKeown's first go at a live album, she's racked up five full-length discs and two EPs. It seemed only appropriate that a frequent gig-playing artist like her, who spends more than half of a year entertaining crowds, release a recording of one of them. Aware that this was a one-shot deal – two, actually, since consecutive nights were recorded and the best was selected – McKeown had no reservations about the album. This was, after all, like being a lesbian: Totally familiar.
Sexuality has never been a much-talked-about aspect of the hardworking funky folk musician, who just last year released "Sing You Sinners," an acclaimed album of re-imagined standards. And that's just fine. "I feel really grateful and proud and protective of the fact that I can be a musician and have that to be the focus of what I talk about and what I do – and also be totally transparent with who I am."
And besides being a lesbian folkie, who is she? A bird-loving, nearly-30-year-old – her birthday is this week – whose songwriting inspiration is drawn from books and movies. Who watches films like Jodie Foster's "The Brave One" – and then regrets forking over 10 smackers. Who's reading Wallace Stegner's "Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs" and then hopes for a candy-made mountain. And who once thought she'd be an ornithologist – a professional scientist who studies the lives and behaviors of birds.
"I had a couple of strange summer jobs," McKeown admits. "One of them: I worked on a naval base outside of D.C. that had a bluebird nesting program running on it. So, I ran that for a couple of summers, just checking on 70 odd boxes over 10 square miles and noting what birds were born when and how many survived."
She flew away from that pretty quickly, though. While part of an arts cooperative in Providence, R.I., where she lived for three years as a resident artist accompanied by 10 other creative folks, she decided to put art before birds.
"It's basically a 24/7 sensory overload in one building," she recalls, "and it taught me everything I needed to know about how to do this as a career. Which I always thought was ironic that at the same time, I was paying all this money to go to a fancy school and while I was learning amazing things for my brain, I wasn't learning how to live my life."
Now she does. And most of it's traveling in her spacious, economical Dodge Sprinter, making it even trickier to keep her current relationship from sinking. Through e-mail, or phone, or fax – and even postcards and care packages – McKeown stays close to her partner. Even when she can't be close by.
"It sucks," she says. "I also love my job, so I don't really have a choice. All the effort that it takes is totally worth it in terms of keeping communication open and feeling like you're a daily part of your partner's life – whether you're actually in the same room or not."
Quickies & Bits: Erin McKeown
What's on your iPod?
I'm gonna have to get my iPod out; I'm terrible at this question. I listen to a band called Friends of Dean Martinez, who does kind of soundtrack stuff. I don't listen to things with words very much. And what is one more thing that I've been checking out? My tour manager was playing me the new Kanye West record ('Graduation'). I don't like it as much as the one before – and I hate saying that because I would be really irritated if somebody said that to me. (laughs)
You're a sports fan, but what's your least favorite?
Golf. I like to play putt-putt, but I'm just not interested.
You collect funny instruments. What's the funniest that you have?
There's a classic tiny Casio keyboard called the SK-1, and I have a modified SK-1 that has an Atari joystick attached to it that you can use to control the different sounds.
With Halloween approaching, what scares you the most?
Oh, God! I don't know. Nothing particularly scares me that I would put in the newspaper. I suppose what scares me most is having things that I'm scared about and don't want in the newspaper, in the newspaper.
