It’s hardly surprising that
Kaki King was the first female artist to earn a spot on
Rolling Stone’s venerable “Guitar God” list. Through the years, the 28-year-old Atlanta native has garnered favorable comparisons to such finger-style giants as
Michael Hedges, Alex DeGrassi, and
Leo Kottke. Essentially self-taught, King burst on the scene with her debut album in 2003, unfurling a flashy, percussive, two-handed technique that she had been developing since adolescence.
On her latest album, however,
King decided to temper her innovative six-string work in service of her most accessible songwriting to date. Produced by Malcolm Burn,
Dreaming of Revenge is divided equally between dazzling instrumentals and tracks that feature King’s airy, hypnotic vocals. She recently spoke about her evolving work on guitar and the factors that helped shape her style.
Do you remember the very first time you held a guitar?I don't have a memory of first holding a guitar, but I know I was five years old when I started playing. I don’t remember
not knowing how to play guitar. I wasn’t necessarily very good at first, but I do remember, not long afterwards, that playing felt very natural and normal to me. My formal learning mostly came from a year of instruction, when I was five, plus Beatles songbooks and my Dad teaching me a few things. From there, it was mostly a matter of learning by ear.
Until you were 10, you played pretty much in a conventional way. What triggered the move toward something more avant-garde?I reached a point where I was pretty competent, and I started thinking, “Where do I go now, to get to another level?” It was a long, slow process that went on from age five to age 19. I can’t say that in those years there were any real milestones, or eureka moments. There was a lot of dedication to what I was doing, but there wasn’t any sudden realization of, “This is my path.” I was doing lots of other things. I wanted to write string quartets, I was doing compositional work, and I was playing drums in rock bands. It was a variety of musical stuff. This type of music just happened to become my focus because it became my career.
You once said that most great guitar players also know how to sing. Why is that important?That seems true of all really good musicians―not just guitarists. And that served as a motivation to get my act together, so to speak. On my first two albums, what I was doing on guitar was so complicated, and took so much concentration to play, that to sing, as well, seemed sort of like gilding the lily. It just didn’t make sense to have vocals, with that much guitar going on. But I did want to work harder at being able to sing and play my instrument at the same time, in a competent way. Singing and strumming chords is one thing, but being able to finger pick, and do challenging stuff on guitar, and sing well at the same time, is a different sort of challenge.
Your voice seems especially suited to pop music.Well, I had a really big love affair with shoe-gaze music when I was a teenager. In that type of music, everyone sings in a high, ethereal voice, so as a singer, I gravitated towards that. Also, as an instrumentalist who was just starting to sing, it made sense to treat the voice as just another instrument. But on the new record, my lyrics became a bit more poignant, and that made me want them to be heard a bit more. It really comes down to the difference between singing in a falsetto, which pretty much anyone can do, or using your natural singing voice.
You also handle most of the drum-work on the new album. Has playing drums made you a better guitar player?Definitely. I’ve only realized recently that the impact is pretty basic. It has to do with the independence of the hands. Because I can do something with one hand while the other is doing something totally different, I can get twice as much done on the guitar. People sometimes see what I’m playing and go, “Oh, my God!” while I’m thinking, “Actually it’s not that hard.” But that’s really because I'm using techniques I learned through playing drums. I'm transferring that to the guitar.
Has it been an advantage or a disadvantage to be a young female making a style of music that’s usually thought to be the province of older males?That was cool a while ago, when I was sort of carrying the torch for a younger generation of guitarists, of a particular type. But that’s changed in the past couple of years. That was really more the case with my first two albums. Nowadays people are like, “Oh, she’s a musician, and she plays guitar.” There are less “guitar police” coming to my shows.
How do you envision what your music might be like few years from now?That’s hard to do. Two years ago, I never would have thought I would make a record like this new one. But actually I was thinking about that recently: What
am I going to be doing? A lot of times it’s not really up to you. You don’t always know where the music’s going to come from, or who you’re going to meet and what your inspirations will be. I still think, “God, I’ve got so much more to learn, and there’s so much more to do with this instrument.” I’m really excited about that.
Click
here for free Kaki King tablature from:
