Metro Pulse/Music/Erin McKeown

Comment
on this story

What:
Erin McKeown with Meika Pauley and Brandy Robinson

When:
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 9 p.m.

Where:
Blue Cats

Cost:
$5

Erin McKeown composes a soundtrack for fun

by Paige M. Travis

If you're looking for a theme song—something bouncy, optimistic and smart that will clear the clouds from your sky—Erin McKeown has just the ticket. Her latest CD Grand is a soundtrack for the life well-lived, balanced with joy and sadness. Jazzy be-bop tunes mingle with skipping beats, plunking banjo, dramatic piano; it's a layered confection lightly coated with McKeown's sweet voice.

Her jazz guitar work (played on her Gretsch hollow-body arch-top) has earned comparison to Django Reinhardt, her songwriting to Randy Newman and voice to Bjork and Liz Phair. McKeown doesn't so much sound like these artists as stand alongside them as a fellow musician offering something unique to the pop music genre that's heavy with less substantial stuff.

"People will always listen to pop music to hear about boyfriends and money and breakups," she says. "I think there's a lack of diversity in what songs are about. And I hope that changes."

One possible harbinger of change in mainstream music is Radiohead, who McKeown counts among her favorite bands. "I love them," she says. "They've been doing a lot to say to their fans, 'Don't love us without question.' I think it's good, challenging music. I hope that more things like Radiohead break through and more people will be interested in the music that I make."

Her songs, which do address every-day concerns of love and partying, strive for a literary and cinematic scope. They're populated by the characters of McKeown's fancy: Judy Garland, Igor Stravinsky, people from an Arthur Miller short story, and her own earthbound but equally interesting friends. Her particular fascination with Garland inspired at least two songs on the disc and the dirge-like performance of "Lucky Day." Images of the celebrity life—from the highs of fame to the low points "looking for pills in draperies"—direct the CD's overall tone and imagery.

McKeown's own life creeps into the picture occasionally, but the 25-year-old has found a way to balance the revealing nature of songwriting with the other subjects that keep her interested.

"I'm glad to not talk about myself," she says, pointing out that there's also a downside to channeling others' stories. "Getting into someone else's head is not as easy to do every night as it is to just speak from where you're standing. It's a challenge and blessing."

Listeners who hear retro echoes in McKeown's wavering voice might cry "throwback," but she's firmly grounded in the present, finding no contradiction between her love of hip-hop and electronic music with the "old sensibility" of her music.

"I feel like a true part of the modern world," she says. And although her music, along with bands like the Squirrel Nut Zippers and the Be Good Tanyas, alludes to some other era, it's not been a conscious choice to sound "old."

"Some people told me, 'You sound old,' before I even knew what old music sounded like. In that sense, I've never thought about it," she says. McKeown just makes the music that sounds good to her.

Grand is more orchestrated than her debut Distillation, released on Signature Sounds in 2000. McKeown, whose primary instruments are piano and guitar, became more proficient on organ, drums and bass in order to lay down the basic tracks.

"I think of Grand as a little cocktail party," McKeown told TimeOut New York. Indeed, the record evokes a cheery atmosphere on the surface, while having deeper contents to consider upon closer listening. But theme songs, like pop songs and parties, don't need depth to be enjoyable. They just need to make you feel good, like you're the star of the show until the curtains close and the lights go down.