Dayna Kurtz

In April of last year, New Jersey native Dayna Kurtz escaped to the desert to write the songs for her fourth album. "I completed most of the songs for Another Black Feather in a hermitage maintained by some lovely people for solitary religious introspection. I stayed in an adobe hut on 500 acres in the Sonoran desert in Arizona. There was no electricity, nobody around for miles, a cot, a table, chair and pitcher. 2 weeks. I brought no distractions – no novels, only books of writing exercises and poetry. It was so quiet at night I could hear the blood beat in my ears. It was sublime, and I wrote constantly. When I wasn't writing I'd take a walk, stop and watch a bug climbing around a desert flower for an hour. I learned a lot about my friends when I described this trip to them, and showed them pictures. My artist/writer/musician friends were mostly envious. But some people looked at the hut and said, 'Is that a dirt floor?'” Making the album came just as easily. "We recorded the basics live to tape, 2 or 3 takes per song, and picked the best of 'em right then. I love analog. When you record digitally it just requires too much imagination to hear how good it might sound when you've overdubbed, mixed and mastered. When you record to tape, it sounds like a record right out of the gate. It helped us make decisions faster – we just knew when it was good or great or bad, not based on the perfection of performance, but based on overall vibe.” “It was the best of both worlds; the warmth and immediacy of analog with the final flexibility of pro-tools. I'm never recording any other way again.” Co-producing the album with Dayna was Randy Crafton, who has worked with Dayna on all 3 of her studio albums. Some of the musicians who helped Dayna bring her songs to life include her long-time back up band, bassist Dave Richards and keyboard/accordionist Peter Vitalone, the singer-songwriter Malcolm Holcombe, Matt Darriau and Frank London from the Klezmatics, Jorge Alfano (charango), Rob Curto (accordion), and Danny Bensi, Saunder Jurriaans and Gregory Rogove from the band Tarantula AD. "Dave, Randy, Pete and I are turning into a really crack studio machine lately. Both Randy and Dave have started families in the last couple of years, so they really can't get on the road with me all that often anymore. It's made us really appreciate our time in the studio that much more. They're family now, and we play like it. They know my quirks as a player so well that we barely have to discuss what's going on, they're just right there. I played a lot of lap steel for the first time on this record. It's a completely different feel than regular old slide guitar - you have to keep it very simple, to the point, and it's unforgiving on intonation. I keep on wanting to invent studio projects for us so I don't have to wait till I've written an album full of songs to get back there with them. I want to find someone who wants us as a backing band, so I can just play lap steel guitar for hours with these guys. I wish we could be Booker T and the MG's, and find our Bill Withers to produce and back up." Following in the footsteps of the diverse Beautiful Yesterday, Another Black Feather finds Dayna leaning more heavily on her roots and country influences than usual, in particular making generous use of her new lap steel guitar, and showcasing her prodigious slide work on other songs. "One of the things that I seem to encounter constantly is that I don't really quite fit anywhere," observes Dayna Kurtz. Asked by a European journalist what her music was 'made of', Dayna replied, "If you're at the flea market, you walk past all the fine old antiques and the cheap designer knockoff clothing from China, past the used German leather jackets, and over in the back is an old man with a battered tweed hat who has some blankets on the ground covered with old toasters and a pair of ladies knickers from the 50's, a snow globe from the 1992 Olympic games, and a box of old men's watches and broken reading glasses and teaspoons. I'll be picking through there." The lack of a ready stylistic tag hasn't stopped the resourceful performer from building a substantial audience—and a compelling body of recorded work—on her own terms. She maintains an enthusiastic international fan base that's embraced the poetic passion of her songwriting and the communicative power of her voice, an unforgettable, distinctly husky instrument that's capable of immense depth and sensitivity. She has also inspired reams of rapturous acclaim from critics and won admiration from her musical peers. Dayna Kurtz began performing her original compositions in public as a teenager, and subsequently spent the better part of a decade touring solo across the back roads of America, selling CD's out of her trunk and mesmerizing club and festival crowds with her riveting live performances. Along the way, she opened shows for the likes of Richie Havens (who became a fan and lent guest vocals to her debut studio album, Postcards from Downtown). The last few years has found Dayna winning over new fans in the New York City music scene. In the past two years she has been invited to open up for Rufus Wainwright, Antony & the Johnsons, and Keren Ann. Additionally, Dayna has won over fellow "Living Room" habitué Norah Jones, who sings a duet with Dayna on "I Got It Bad…" (From Beautiful Yesterday). Outside of her new hometown, the legendary Richard Thompson invited Dayna to open up for a coast-to-coast nationwide tour that found Dayna converting some of his faithful fans. The fan response and critical attention generated by Kurtz's grass roots touring efforts inevitably drew interest from the mainstream music industry. Despite her indie status, Dayna has found an enthusiastic audience, winning high-profile guest spots on such radio shows as World Cafe, Mountain Stage and NPR's Morning Edition. But nowhere has the interest in Dayna's music been more pronounced than in Holland, where Dayna's debut studio album soared into the top 20 of the album charts on the strength of the hit single "Love Gets in the Way". In the summer of 2003, Dayna went from performing in front of 50 people at the Living Room in New York City's lower east side, to headlining the fabled Paradiso theatre in Amsterdam in front of 1000 people in what would be her first of many sold out shows in the Netherlands in the months to follow. Dayna has since then discovered a larger audience in Europe, and this spring alone will find her in Greece, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the UK. But Dayna Kurtz has worked too hard to allow such adulation to go to her head. "Every step I've taken has felt really organic, and like they've been made at the right time," she states, adding, "The records I've made feel like honest expressions of where I'm at musically, and the making of them has been joyful and interesting." "Besides, every musician should feel like a rock star in at least one country."