One of these days, Kinnie Starr will figure out who she is.
And when she does, the Vancouver singer-songwriter will have completed a thought-provoking book exploring identity and in which community those of mixed race -- like Starr -- best fit.
"I'm in the early stages of a first manuscript for a book called Half-Breed Sitting on the Fence," Starr says during a phone interview. "My father's part Native and my mother's Irish-English. And I've had a really hard time figuring out what it means to be Native in this country when you're not a full-blooded Indian. Who is your community? How do you define yourself?
"I'm interviewing other people who are of mixed blood, specifically other Metis people, just to find out how everyone feels. This new generation that I'm a part of ... a lot of us are mixed. A lot of us don't know where we fit on a racial metre."
Where Starr fits musically also blurs several boundaries. Her live shows come equipped with a smorgasboard of words, beats, moods and languages (she belts out in English, French and Spanish) set to ambient dub and hip-hop beats, with spurts of jazz and heavy funk/rock cropping up sporadically.
Starr also doesn't restrict herself to holding fort on stage. Without warning, the 30-year-old can pop up in the middle of a crowded room, her sneering vocal limits reaching as far as her microphone cable will allow. Or, she'll just do away with a mike entirely and challenge her audience to listen more carefully.
"I've looked out at an audience and I go, 'Oh my God, this is gonna be a really hard show.' But by the end of the night, they're all out of their seats, all dancing, they're smiling and you're like, 'Yeah, this was great,' " says Starr, who plays tonight at Zaphod Beeblebrox 2 in support of her newest indie release, Tune-Up.
Starr's used to putting her vulnerability to the test.
She released a cassette-only debut, Learning 2 Cook in 1995 on her Violet Inch Records label. Within a year, major label Mercury Records caught Starr fever and helped bring national attention to her full-length debut tidy. Relentess touring followed, including stints aboard Sarah McLachlan's 1997 Lilith Fair bandwagon, successful Scrappy Bitches Tours (featuring Starr, Veda Hille and Oh Susanna) in North America and Europe and Western Canadian dates opening for Alanis Morissette in 1999.
Unfortunately, the Alanis shows never materialized. Mercury fell victim to the merger that created the mega-giant Universal Music label. Starr felt victimized by reps wanting to reshape her music; thus, a 1998 album, Mended, never did see the light of day. (However, hop-hop label Infiniti Records, as well as Jeepster in the U.K., plan to release the 'lost' disc.)
While "relieved" to win back control of her artistic freedom as an indie, Starr says she lost a number of friends along the way. "I don't perform with any of the people I used to play with. I can't. They're not kind to me anymore. But the people I perform with now, they're there because they want to play music, not because they want to get famous."
On that level, Starr knows who she is.
