Kaki King
Playing a free concert 4 p.m. April 14 at MTSU
Also playing 8 p.m. April 17 at 3rd & Lindsley
Obscured by a six-string Ovation, Kaki King's 5-foot frame barely curves to fit the body of her guitar. At a glance, the advantage seems to belong to her hollow-bodied acoustic—that is, until King strikes her first chord. From that point, size doesn't matter as she picks, pounds, smacks and hammers her instrument in an awe-inducing barrage. Combining hypnotic melodies, left-field progressions and two-handed finger-tapping over the bridge and neck, King plays the guitar something fierce.
After releasing her 2003 debut, Everybody Loves You, King, who is now 25, made the talk-show rounds, appearing on Conan and Letterman. She also toured incessantly, and it all was enough to earn King a foothold alongside fingerstyle greats like Preston Reed and Michael Hedges, both whom she cites as influences. Yet for a young woman working in a traditionally male genre, her prodigious talents makes her more than a novelty. "The affect of music is to change people's emotion—to make them feel something," King says, during a recent break from touring. "My goal is to get a rise out of people, be it beautiful or melancholy or dark. What I can do on television or in a video for three minutes is definitely not what I can do for 90 minutes."
Alternating between aggressive punk-folk and jazzy digressions, King never settles firmly into either mode. Many of her compositions begin just above a whisper before achieving a frenetic peak through dizzying repetition and layering. Her arrangements are tight without being claustrophobic, allowing the sound enough wiggle room for commercial appeal. Like the similarly percussive Ani DiFranco, King has earned a following among fans and critics without much help from radio, quite a feat for someone who had her heart set on being a drummer.
King began studying classical guitar at the insistence of her father when she was barely 5 years old. Despite her aptitude, though, she set the instrument aside, opting instead for the drums. At the age of 11, she returned to the guitar, learning songs by Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles and The Smiths; after moving to New York to attend college, she began playing writers' nights in the Village. It wasn't until after graduation and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, however, that she committed to her instrument, honing her playing in the deepest of trenches: the subways of New York City.
"That was the first real sign that I might be able to make a career out of what I was doing," King says. "I learned how to physically and mentally play a show in the most difficult circumstances, which definitely was helpful when I played in loud bars."
A buzz grew as King landed gigs at the Mercury Lounge, where she also waited tables and tended bar. Augmenting her sets with witty stage banter, she soon had her audiences flummoxed. After releasing Everybody Loves You on the independent Velour label, she immediately signed a major label deal with Epic.
The album that King released for Epic, Legs to Make Us Longer, is as incisive as it is virtuosic. On the sullen "Can the Gwot Save Us?"—a commentary on the global war on terrorism—and "My Insect Life," King trades her Ovation for lap steel while also singing on the latter. The album's highpoint, though, is the reflective "Ignots." Cued as King pumps the heel of her right hand against the body of her guitar, the track's pulsating 4/4 seems to breathe as she tenderly plucks the instrument's strings.
The dynamics on the album are extensive, but Legs never lacks cohesion. Traditionalists might view King's freewheeling style as borderline transgressive, but her ability to wed the familiar with the avant-garde, and to do so with a pronounced urban sensibility, bodes well for a subgenre of guitar playing that is at times too insular for its own good.
