Beyond her years

Erin McKeown distills the best from youth and age

by Laura Kiritsy

When I was 12, I spent way too much time listening to hits like Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" and the Flashdance

soundtrack -- tepid pop that did little more than inspire bad fashion -- like wearing leg warmers over my corduroy pants. Providence-based singer/songwriter Erin McKeown recalls how at 12 she was undergoing a musical epiphany -- discovering the Beatles and rock and roll, and teaching herself to play the guitar. This explains why at the ripe old age of 22, McKeown, a senior at Brown University, is on the edge of becoming the Next Big Thing while I'm just writing about it. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

With her forthcoming CD Distillation, McKeown rolls out the Way-back Machine, mining elements of old-school jazz, blues, and Tin Pan Alley song-writing styles. She doesn't so much update these simple sounds as dust 'em off and shine 'em up a tad with her funked-up guitar sounds and snappy, subtle lyrics. The result is a disc that, from the opening notes of the rollicking "Queen of Quiet," in which she proclaims, "I don't say it, I imply it./I'm the Queen of Quiet," will have you bebopping in your living room like a juiced-up hepcat.

Distillation's vintage sound was in several ways the result of form following function. "It's true. Old is one of the words that gets used to describe how the record came out," says McKeown, who will perform at WPI on October 3. McKeown took her time recording her album over a series of long-weekend sessions in an Amherst farmhouse where producer Dave Chalfant, formerly of the Nields, was living last fall and winter.

"He had his studio set up all over the house. We would do the vocal and the guitar in the living room, and then we'd record the drums in this wood-paneled pantry that also had the piano in it. And we did a lot of the electric- guitar stuff in the stairwell and just sort of decided to let the rooms sound the way they did and the songs have this open, sort of spatial feel to them. Hopefully you get a feeling you're sitting in the room with the musicians on the record."

When McKeown and Chalfant couldn't scrounge up a more accomplished musician, they tossed ego aside and played instruments on which neither was particularly skilled. "There was piano, for example, and I called a friend of mine who's an amazing piano player, but she couldn't make the session so I played it," McKeown says. "And I couldn't have played what she played, but then the record has this character of this other kind of piano playing."

The same process can be heard in the album's guitar, keyboard, and sampler segments. "Neither of us do that very well," McKeown explains, "but I think that contributes, too, to the old feel of it. Things are fairly simple and not particularly sophisticated on some of the instruments because we were at the limit of how well we could play."

Unsurprisingly, McKeown's cut-and-paste approach isn't limited to her instrumentation and recording. She describes her song writing as collecting and collaging phrases ("the weirder the better"), themes, and thoughts and boiling them down into coherent stories. She admits that it's a slow process. A prime example is "La petite mort" a spirited tune about the fated Estelle, on her wedding day. Part elegy and part drinking song, "La petite mort" began as a wedding gift for a friend of McKeown's who hung out in a Southwestern Virginia town called Estelle while she was in college.

"I couldn't afford to give her a wedding gift, so I thought I would write her a song. And of course I only started writing the song a month before her wedding so it wasn't finished by the time her wedding rolled around," McKeown says. "La petite mort" evolved as she recalled her friend's desire to have Edith Piaf, the French diva, playing at her funeral when she died, which also inspired the songwriter to throw some badly translated -- via the Internet -- Piaf lyrics into the mix.

"So I had all these pieces and was trying to write a song for my friend. The only way I could make them all fit together was to write a story about a funeral on a wedding day, and I'm glad it wasn't done by the wedding because that's not a great gift." Especially the verse about dying while doing it in a hammock -- "Swinging like a rocking horse/canon balling down the track./We both found heaven right then./You just chose not to come back."

Then again, it's not the gift, it's the thought that counts.

Erin McKeown appears on Tuesday, October 3, at 8 p.m. at the WPI Coffeehouse, Riley Commons, 100 Institute Road, Worcester. Admission is $5, $3 for students. There's a $1 discount if you bring your own coffee cup. Call (508) 831-5509.