 |
 ERIN McKEOWN is at the Drake tomorrow for her new CD We Will Become Like Birds. |
Erin McKeown went around the musical block on her first three albums -- swing jazz, rock, torch songs, folk, you name it. For her brand-new fourth album, We Will Become Like Birds, though, the Boston-based singer/songwriter decided to pack in the super-eclecticism and try to focus in on a more specific sound.
"There are lots of different kinds of music I'm interested in," McKeown explains, "and on my previous albums I explored all of them at once. I'd go from a swing song to a punk song and then a pop song. This time I decided to find out what would happen if I tried to work in one style. I was writing drum machine beats and using my four-track, which kept everything in a pop-electronic modern mode, and I thought that was a nice challenge. The way I describe it is that I've made a straightforward pop album, but I'm not a straightforward pop writer."
Another thing that helped McKeown keep her focus was the fact that she had recently become single and was inspired to write about it.
"In some ways, this record was incredibly easy to make," she says. "The subject matter of the songs dictated the sound. They're all about the same thing -- a breakup that I went through. It's such a rich topic, as many albums before mine have proven. But I had a lot to say about it, and a lot of different ways to say it. So the variety is still there, but it's floating out from one central idea."
McKeown's voice has an unaffected, confessional tone reminiscent of Liz Phair, pre-makeover, and even when she's writing about heartbreak, she tends to look on the bright side.
"That was something I worked hard on," she says. "I always imagined this album as a whole, even when there was only one song written. So at various points I wanted to fill in the gaps. I had a few songs written and I realized I wasn't showing the positive side, so on the next set of songs I tried to add a more positive twist.
|
"I think you have a choice when you're finished with a relationship. You can remember just the terrible parts, or everything, including the good parts -- and that's what I wanted to do."
When she had her songs -- including one co-written with the Jayhawks' Gary Louris -- McKeown took off to record in New Orleans, with producer Tucker Martine in tow.
"I'm friends with Ani DiFranco, and once when I was visiting New Orleans she took me around the city -- we didn't sleep for 36 hours," McKeown says. "She showed me the feeling of it, and I got this impression of it as a place that mixed the sad and the happy in a beautiful way. Something clicked in my mind, and I thought, 'That's what I want to do with my record.' It's about something sad, but there's a positive way to look at it, a triumphant thing to take hold of in the midst of all the sadness. New Orleans is like that too. It's a very emotional place."
Erin McKeown plays the Drake tomorrow. Also tomorrow, a bunch of folksingers including Noah Zacharin, Holmes Hooke, Wakefield Brewster and Ellen Carol play Hugh's Room in aid of the Friends for Life bike rally, in which a group of cyclists ride to Montreal to raise funds for people living with AIDS.