Folk singer Erin McKeown is the kind of musician that doesn’t come around that often anymore.  Everything she touches is somehow old-fashioned, like its coming from a fuzzy record player or scraped from an old washboard found amongst tubs of boot liquor. McKeown’s scratchy voice, her revitalization of old jazz standards and her simple instrumentation create the feeling.

I’ve always wanted to love her because she’s so cool.  She graduated from Brown with a degree in ethnomusicology.  Her big musical influence is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  She performed at Queerstock, a festival for queer musicians. She’s starting at Harvard in the fall, trying to make creative people able to make livings with their work. 

And these things make me want to love McKeown, but I don’t.  She’s hard to pin down, but not pleasantly so.  Critics always call her kooky or quirky, saying that they can’t really describe her music because it crosses so many boundaries.  On her 2006 album Sing You Sinners, for example, she sings in French haphazardly and changes instruments mid-song madly. It’s almost as if she doesn’t think her songwriting skills don’t stand up on their own without some flashy bells and whistles to back them up.

She sometimes makes electronic music, sometimes she plays a simple electric guitar, sometimes she sings nasty, wailing songs, sometimes she uncomfortably scats.  To top it off, her look is always changing drastically, from pigtails and little ringer t-shirts to men’s suits and ties with spiked hair. She’s itchy and antsy on stage, bobbing back in forth behind her guitar and microphone, making the audience dizzy.  

Some artists can pull off this kind of disparity, but McKeown can’t.  Some musicians can be all over the map because that is their aesthetic. McKeown seems smart.  She writes great lyrics sometimes and some of her music is fantastic.  However, a lot of the time, it feels like she is still messing around, trying to figure herself out. It seemed like she made it big too soon.  

All that said, she misses often with her music, but on her latest record she finally created something complete.  It makes sense.  The album Hundreds of Lions was released in 2009.  Every good record is a story in itself, not fragments of a bunch of different people pieced together randomly.  On this album, all the pieces work together to create a single story.  From “The Lions,” a song about circus performers performing on-and-off the big top to “Santa Cruz” about a failed romance and a road trip, this album seems like McKeown has learned that she doesn’t need to use the discarded remnants of all of music’s past.  She just needs herself and simplicity. On her song “To a Hammer,” she gives herself away to this simplicity, using only a single acoustic guitar and simple chords, employing alliterative and consonant lyrics and singing about the most common dilemma in songs--love.  It’s beautiful. 

Here’s “Santa Cruz.” Even her uncomfortable swaying has calmed.