Search - Dayna Kurtz :: Rise And Fall

A peculiar thing happens when listening to Dayna Kurtz' new record, Rise and Fall, her first album of originals in 4 years. Each song offers the sensation that it has been in your ear before, but you haven t got a clue from where. It moves around, right there on the edge of your memory, flitting across influences, evoking moods that other songs from other times in your life have evoked, but you can't quite place the source.

She speaks to love and things that feel and smell and taste like love, but perhaps aren t. You're Not What I Need (But You re All that I Want) manages to conjure both a vintage Stax ballad Dan Penn might have written for Aretha and a dusty Texas roadhouse weeper. It delivers an emotional punch like a first kiss or your last break-up.

The stark, haunting The Hole was written unflinchingly about the thoughts that crossed her mind as she was digging the hole for her father s ashes in a field near the family home in Vermont. I m humming a lullabye you used to sing/with my head on your chest/your voice hollow and rumbling...I m wearing your shirt/ and I m digging a hole in the ground.

A love song from the grave, If I Go First cycles elegantly, slow in its graceful imagery of each of the four seasons, from fall - I ll wait for you/while birches whisper/their grey hearts curled/on butcher paper - to summer - I ll wait for you/ and the sun will rake/it s perfect fingers/through your hair to a final chorus - When you no longer rise and fall/or thirst or hunger/come find me in Summer heartbreaking as both an elegy and a tender love song.

Rise and Fall evokes all her previous records, diverse as they ve been there s the clear influence of all those unearthed mid-century R&B nuggets of her most recent Secret Canon records, glimpses of the shadowed cabaret of Beautiful Yesterday, nods to the most countrified of American Standard s rockabilly and much of the sort of poetry, writerly story telling and internal dialogue that elevated Postcards From Downtown and Another Black Feather.

Says Kurtz, This album is the most like (debut) Postcards From Downtown in that it covers such a long span of collected original material. I was busy putting out records of obscure cover songs, (the Secret Canon series). And even American Standard, though more than half original, was a sort of concept album songs that didn t work as country or rockabilly got shelved. As a result, Rise and Fall covers these last few years of my life and they were pretty heavy years; My father died, my marriage ended. I moved to New Orleans. I had a couple years of wild oat-sowing and then found a grand new love. There s been a lot to think about, to write about.

With roots in New Jersey, a lengthy New York City past, and her time now divided between her family s cabin on a river in Vermont, and a home on another river in New Orleans, she is an entirely American creature -yet her greatest successes and most regular touring have happened in in theatres and rock clubs in European cities such as Barcelona and Amsterdam. She had a top 10 hit song in the Netherlands with the gorgeous and beguiling, Love Gets in the Way . She has toured with Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, Richie Havens, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Dr. John, Rufus Wainright and Mavis Staples. She s recorded a duet with Norah Jones, and both Ms. Jones and Bonnie Raitt have sung her praises in interviews. She has appeared at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, The Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival, The Celebrate Brooklyn Festival, Mountain Stage and Austin City Limits Festival.