| POETIC DIGRESSION Josef Woodard, News-Press Correspondent May 19, 2006 8:57 AM The respected, Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter Kris Delmhorst has wended her way through Santa Barbara on several occasions, playing such varied venues as SOhO, Muddy Waters and the Presidio Chapel. Generally, she comes equipped with a satchel of fine original songs, done up in solo or duo fashion. The story changes a bit when her band headlines the "Sings Like Hell" concert series Saturday at the Lobero. Delmhorst will bring along a band, as heard on her fine new album, "Strange Conversations," on the independent Signature Sounds label. This new project is, in fact, a strange departure from her earlier three albums in that the songs' lyrics flowed not from Delmhorst's own mind, but the adapted poems of Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Eliot and that Sufi favorite, Rumi. Lest we might expect a batch of straight-laced art songs, though, the album is a rollicking and even rootsy affair, full of tasty, vibrato-colored electric guitar, clarinet licks, fiddle and other touches of Americana from the post-modern saloon. Delmhorst's voice is strong and supple, as usual, and easy to warm up to, regardless of the intellectual content spilling forth. On the phone from her home in a small town in western Massachusetts before heading out west for her current tour, Delmhorst spoke about the unique question of balance that's involved in her latest song set. "With these songs," she says, "especially for some of them, they're really chewy and there's a lot going on in the words. I wanted those songs to feel natural and easy, to free people up to think about what was going on in the lyrics. Also, poetry has a certain reputation of not being necessarily a good time, and I didn't want this record to not be a good time," she said with a laugh. "Strange Conversations" is the fourth album for Delmhorst, who was raised in Brooklyn and moved northward to Maine and then Boston for many years. The seeds for her unique new album began with a song called "Water Water," an adaptation of a short work by 17th century poet Robert Herrick. It all began, she recalls, as "just an exercise. I was in the mood to write songs, but had no lyrics in my head that I was interested in at that moment. I flipped through the Norton Anthology and found this tiny poem. The original poem is maybe six lines. I turned it into a song. I never thought I would play it out, but just considered it at the time as something fun to do. But it turned into a favorite, live." Later, the idea evolved in various ways. She went to hear her parents, both classical vocalists, singing Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Sea Symphony," a setting of Walt Whitman poetry Delmhorst later adapted for her song "Light of the Light." "Things were getting filed away," she says, "and suddenly one day, I realized that it had reached this critical mass and there was a project's worth of stuff waiting for attention. "Once I decided to really focus on it, probably two-thirds of the record got written in about a week. The more involved they were, the more adaptive or reductive the process was, the longer it took." By and large, the folk-pop realm of singer-songwriters, at least after Bob Dylan, has been based on the idea of singers writing their own songs or covering their contemporaries. The incidence of actually setting poetry is par for the course in classical music, the world of art songs and other concert music vocal work, but in singer-songwriter circles, it's more of a rarely trodden field of endeavor. "There have been a few," she clarifies. "I've found a few more things in the course of this project. People have brought them to my attention. You can think about Robert Burns and old ballad poetry, which flowed easily between being spoken and being sung. There are tons of traditional folk song settings of those old poems. So there's that tradition. "More recently, Greg Brown did a cool record that was all William Blake poems set to music. Leonard Cohen actually did a version of 'We'll Go No More A-Roving,' which I put on this record, in a completely different version. There are a few other examples. I'm now accumulating a collection of peoples' stuff. But it's not something you see every day, that's for sure." Surprisingly, given her natural gift for song, Delmhorst's present path as a singer-songwriter came relatively late in life. As she recalls, "I've played music my whole life and wrote terrible high school poetry and obsessed about song lyrics for my whole life. It's still surprising to me that it took so long, but I think I was about 25 when I first started writing songs." Once she found herself in the world of songmaking, there was no turning back. "I had the feeling of stepping into a river with a strong current, and I never really looked back. I did other jobs and it took awhile before it was supporting me, but really, once I latched onto that, it became the governing compass, almost right away. "Sometimes, it takes a little effort to remember how lucky I am, but usually it's pretty easy. It's a great life. It's amazing to be able to do what I really enjoy and to make exactly the kind of music I want to make, and still have a label I can call and tell, 'I'm going to make a record from poems by dead guys,' and have them say, 'Great, can't wait to hear it,' " she says with a laugh. "I can't imagine what I could do that would be more fulfilling." |
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