Post by Mighty McFearless on May 2, 2008 7:42:43 GMT -5
www.theage.com.au/news/music/picking-and-choosing/2008/04/24/1208743152824.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
April 27, 2008
Guitarist Kaki King has no fixed idea of success, she tells Guy Blackman.
Virtuoso guitarist Kaki King is liable to snap at any minute. "Just to let you know, you are the tenth Australian I've spoken to in the last two hours," she says at the start of our conversation. "I'm totally exhausted, I'm out of my mind and I wanna go to bed. But don't worry, it's just the whiskey talking."
Lately, life has been a tiring (but exciting) blur for King, 28. Her array of talents, ranging from an acoustic take on heavy-metal fret-tapping to a newfound proficiency with loop pedals and electric wizardry, has seen her variously nominated for a Golden Globe, serve as a hand model in a feature film and collaborate with rock gods the Foo Fighters.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia and, until recently, based in New York, King has been touring so constantly she is now a homeless troubadour, her belongings stored in a New York City Storage Mart. This current tour supporting the Foo Fighters is the fourth time King has visited Australia in just more than a year.
And of all the crazy experiences she's had of late, the Foo Fighters thing takes the cake. Bandleader Dave Grohl contacted King after seeing some of her videos on Youtube, and eventually invited her to add guitar to the instrumental Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners, from last year's Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace. Since then, King has performed the song live with them a handful of times.
"Dave only gets like 10,000 people at every show, and I get like 120," King says. "For instance, in London, I was playing on stage with him and he said, 'Say: hi Kaki' and they all went, 'Hi Kaki'. Then he goes, 'SAY HI KAKI' and 20,000 Londoners were screaming, 'HI KAKI' all at the same time - that's a total crap-your-pants moment!" Of course, along with all this attention comes a lot of press, and the normally sweet, unaffected King is growing impatient with certain repetitive lines of questioning, and a few unimaginative musical stereotypes.
"When someone goes, 'You're the best female guitarist ever!', I'm like, 'Mmm, ouch'," she says, preferring that gender be kept out of the equation.
"But here's what I will say about it. If you have a teenage son and he's super into sci-fi movies and he plays a lot of video games, you'd be like, 'Yeah, he's that kid'. But if you had a daughter who was like that, it'd be a lot stranger, right? You'd be like, 'Why doesn't she get out more? Why doesn't she have more friends?"'
King's parents, luckily, had no such preconceptions, and King was encouraged to spend long hours alone with her guitar as a teenager. After leaving Atlanta to study at NYU, she was discovered busking in a subway and spent a brief period signed to major label Sony before being lost in the shuffle when it merged with BMG. "Major labels are fffhfft," she says, making a vowel-less sound whose meaning is perfectly clear.
New album Dreaming of Revenge is her third for US independent label Velour (her fourth in total) and only the second to include vocals. Next to her effortlessly accomplished guitar, King's untrained voice adds an endearing, human element to the record.
Of course, along with lyric-writing comes the responsibility of having your thoughts laid bare. "I've started to see with this album the repercussions of being too open with your private life," King says, "and I'm beginning to pull back a bit on what I say with my lyrics."
But when I ask why, despite being an open and proud lesbian, none of King's lyrics or song titles on Dreaming of Revenge seem to refer to her sexuality, she quickly loses her fragile cool.
"Let's work on some openly lesbian song titles - how about 'I Like Muff-Diving', 'I'm a Girl and She's so Hot'. I mean, what are you talking about?"
But just as quickly, she reins herself in again. "I'm sorry, it's just that a lot of people are like, 'So, what's the gay thing about?"' King says. "It's like, 'Oh, f--- me, do we have to go there?'
"There's nothing openly lesbian about the lyrics," she continues.
"There's really not much openly lesbian about the record. I don't reference it, but I certainly would. If I needed something to rhyme with 'bee' then I'd use 'she', if I was writing a song about a lover. It just happened that I didn't on this record."
Although exhausted and occasionally cranky, King is obviously at a very exciting point in her career, and knows that, really, everything is going wonderfully for her.
"The beauty of being who I am right now," she says, "is I get to play in front of thousands of people, and I also get to play intimate, beautiful shows and have a couple of hundred people show up and really dig it. I love both."
Kaki King plays the Corner Hotel tonight, tickets 9427 9198.