On the verge: Kaki King's unique talent gets...

[Mighty McFearless]

USAToday: On the verge: Kaki King's unique talent gets noticed By Brian Mansfield, Special for USA TODAY

www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2008-04-10-kaki-king_N.htm

The best Revenge: Kaki King, 28, released her fourth album, Dreaming of Revenge, in March, which peaked at No. 23 on Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart. Over the past year, though, the 5-foot-1, Brooklyn-based guitarist has found a variety of outlets for her unusual playing style, which incorporates percussive finger-tapping and slap-bass techniques. She performed two songs in the movie August Rush and served as the guitar-playing hand double for teen lead Freddie Highmore. Her contributions to Into the Wild earned her a Golden Globe nomination. She also made guest appearances on albums by the Foo Fighters and Tegan and Sara.

Musical independence: King (her first name is pronounced "khaki") grew up in the Atlanta area. She first picked up the guitar at 5. At 9, she started playing drums. Combining her approach to the two yielded a distinctive style, sometimes reminiscent of Michael Hedges and Leo Kottke. "Usually, when you're a guitar player, one hand is dependent on the other one," she says. "You fret a chord with your left hand; you strum it with the other one. Having played drums, it came instinctively to be ambidextrous, so I applied that to the guitar."

Finding her voice: After recording two albums of instrumentals, King first sang on her 2006 disc, …Until We Felt Red. "I had been singing in other people's bands and writing pop songs," she says. "It's just that the solo guitar thing was such a powerful idiom to discipline yourself to play within." The melody-rich Dreaming of Revenge combines oblique songs and swirling instrumentals, giving King her most well-rounded effort to date. "At some point you stop being a 'guitar player,' you stop being a 'songwriter,' and you start becoming a musician all over," she says.

Changing her tune: King played about a dozen guitars on Dreaming of Revenge. She favors Ovations. "You can tune them really low, and I love getting low, dark tones," she says. She also enjoys deviating from the standard guitar tuning. "I wanted to have a new sound, so the first thing I did was start playing in tunings I'd never played in before. That inspired a lot of the songs."

"One Less" drummer: King appeared, playing drums, in a TV commercial for Gardasil, Merck's vaccine for the human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer. (The casting agent was a pal who knew they were seeking a female drummer.) "I'm just in (it) for half a second," she says. She's changed her hairstyle since shooting the ad, so people don't often recognize her, "but most of my fans knew it was me."
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Headed Down Under: King wraps up an American club tour this weekend with shows in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Later this month, she'll support the Foo Fighters on an Australian tour and plans to join the band onstage for Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners, an instrumental she recorded with the group on its 2007 album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace.