From the writing process to getting gigs, Erin McKeown gives summer students a glimpse into the working musician's life.

By Lesley Mahoney
Berklee.edu Correspondent
July 31, 2007

Erin McKeown performs "Rhode Island is Famous for You" at Berklee.
Photo by Rob Hochschild

Though she's been playing piano since the age of 3 and guitar since age 12, Erin McKeown never dreamed of becoming a professional musician. Instead of spending summers at band camp, the budding scientist went to bird camp with aspirations of a career as an ornithologist.

But early on at Brown University, McKeown realized that she was more interested in music than birds and switched her major to ethnomusicology. "I liked writing songs and I liked playing for people so I started doing that more and more and science less and less," the 30-year-old singer/songwriter told an audience at a clinic in the David Friend Recital Hall.

But winged creatures still matter to McKeown. Her song "Air," which she performed at the clinic and is featured on her album We Will Become Like Birds, is about birds and their adaptations for flight and "how they can be metaphors for something larger."

Exhibiting a huge range in voice and on her hollow body Gretsch guitar, McKeown ran the gamut from folk to pop to Broadway, interweaving performances with advice about the music business and her own life story as she fielded questions from the audience and the clinic's host Rob Rose, associate vice president for special programs.

She dissected her guitar-playing techniques (instead of a pick, she uses three fingers on her right hand adorned with fake nails, along with the side of her thumb; the overdrive on her pedal board is rebuilt by "this crazy guy in Arizona" who "changes the chip out and sends it back and it sounds amazing"); the inspirations for her songs (her own life, books, poems); and her prescription for staying on top of her game (no dairy products or alcohol, regular exercise, plenty of sleep, and keeping her voice down in the car).

Her latest release Sing You Sinners, her first album of covers, draws on lesser-known standards from the American Songbook. At the clinic, she performed the quirky and upbeat Dietz and Schwartz tune "Rhode Island is Famous for You," featured in the 1940s musical Inside U.S.A. McKeown explained that she became intimately familiar with this type of music while at Brown, concentrating her studies on Broadway, musical theater, minstrelsy, and Vaudeville.

"That's when I first fell in love with this music, hearing it in the context for shows and history in a certain time period in America," she said. "That was 10 years ago and it was around the time that I was starting to create my guitar style. It was always melded into what I was doing, and the more I wrote songs, the more I would find that I was recalling things that I had heard from old Vaudeville.

She played "White City" from We Will Become Like Birds, explaining that its impetus was Erik Larson's book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair the Changed America, which tells the parallel tales of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and a serial killer murdering women in the state at the same time. "It took six months to build, it was open for three months, and then they tore the whole thing down," she said of the fair grounds. "So you can build something from scratch. You can try to do the best at something and you can achieve it, and then you can let it go."

	Erin McKeown has developed a signature style of playing electric guitar.
	Photo by Rob Hochschild

When asked how she gets gigs, McKeown said while she now has an agent, it wasn't always easy. She talked about playing open mics in Rhode Island and building a mailing list from there. "And I would make tons of phone calls," she said. "It takes a lot of perseverance and usually, you just start small, get a regular gig, and get a region," she added, noting that New England, rich in venues, is a great place to launch a career.

As for her songwriting process, McKeown constantly records ideas on a minidisc unit that she carries around. Also, she writes down pieces of songs—"whether it's just a line I thought of or a whole B section"—on paper that she tapes up on the wall of a writing room/studio in her house. "I have this room that's covered in words, so if I sit down and have a moment, I can look up on the wall, and there's a piece of an unfinished song," she said. "If it feels good to me that day, I might work on it some more and whatever it gets to, I'll put up on the wall."

Sometimes a few years go by before McKeown uses an idea. "I think it's nice to let things sit because you change as a person and you may not be qualified to write the A section to your B section. You might need your heart broken, or you might need to fall in love, or you might need to have your butt kicked by school or something."

Brit Price, an aspiring songwriter attending the 12-week summer session, was inspired by McKeown's advice. "She had a lot of wisdom to impart. Putting the pieces of paper up opens up a new idea for me," she said.

Since launching her career as a musician some 15 years ago, McKeown says she still loves the work. "I think it's like a long marriage," she said. "The moments are not as continuous as when you first start. You're not so enamored in this passionate way, but the moments that you love are deeper. And I think you also get a real sense of perspective playing tons and tons of shows. The details start to fade. You don't care where you are, you don't care if you have to drive 12 hours. All of that gets out of the way, and you can enjoy the songs for what they are. It really becomes more and more about the music the longer you do it."