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NY Times, Sunday Magazine July 2, 2006
Her Lonely Voice
By DARCY FREY

Katell Keineg is a singer-songwriter who was born in Brittany, raised in Wales and now lives in a top-floor flat overlooking the slate rooftops and cobbled alleys of Georgian Dublin. When she's not at home, which is more than half the year, she makes restless pilgrimages back to Brittany or Cardiff, or to South America, the Caribbean or the northern rim of Africa, where she invariably picks up sonic influences — the sound of Bolivian parade drums, the open-throat singing of the Bulgarian state radio choir, the shouting and clapping of slave songs from the Georgia sea islands — that resurface, in ways large and small, in her music. At any given performance, she may sing in English, French, Spanish, Welsh or Breton and create a set from an astonishing diversity of songs: the insistent, hip hop-driven wordplay of "Partisan"; or the haunting, liturgical "O Iesu Mawr," which she sings a cappella and in Welsh; or the Latin-inflected "Olé, Conquistador," with its anti-imperialist lyrics and aural collage of lyre, castanets and thunder; or the simple, childlike "Old Friend," a new song that, after a brief precis, confines its melody to repeated versions and inversions of a single three-note phrase and manages to break your heart in a minute and 40 seconds.

Keineg is tall and long-limbed, and when she walks up to the mike with her guitar, loose blond hair framing a round, seraphic face, she can seem so uncertain, so diaphanous that you half-expect a strong gust from the side to blow her right offstage. As her spare, hastily-assembled backup band sets up, she tunes her guitar in a state of nerve-racking disarray — she once had to ask a member of the audience for help. But when she begins to sing, the protean richness of her voice — now low and throaty, now high and chimelike — rises from her body as easefully as breath, and she embraces her musical narratives with such intensity of feeling that, despite their many literary allusions and mysterious elisions, she sometimes enters what appears to be an almost trancelike state, brought on by the primal candor of her singing.

In the spring, at a small Lower East Side club called Sin-é, I watched Keineg perform a song called "There You Go," which tells of a woman parting company with the man she loves, though how long she has known him or what passed between them is left unsaid. Opening in a mood of quiet resolve, Keineg used a tender, delicate register to speak, as it were, to the back of her receding lover: "There you go now — swinging down the boulevard, a miracle, that's what you are." As the narrator faced the brute fact of her impending loss, however, Keineg's voice grew more fervent, and rhymes and repetitions served the darker purpose of reminding her of all she once possessed: "I held out my hand and you gave it to me — on a plate, all I could take, I could take more of that." Halfway through the song, as the woman struggled to absorb the fullness of the blow, Keineg replaced her serene refrain of "there you go" with the rhythmically similar but utterly devastating phrase — the plea — to "bring it back," which she kept repeating in a voice soaked with pain: bring it back, bring it back. It was an extraordinary moment: Keineg sang with such ecstatic desperation, so in thrall to the rapture of her loss, she might have been weeping. As the man disappeared for good — "down the boulevard, the avenue, the runway, the white lines" — Keineg murmured: "I turned. I don't know why I did it, but I did," over and over, until she declared, enigmatically, "Now I must return to the underworld." Had she just performed a heart-rending modernization of the parting of Orpheus and Eurydice?

Keineg's live shows — what one critic called her "nearly beatific sense of joy in performance" — have won her a small, devoted following in Dublin and New York. "It's Katell's intensity," says Nancy Jeffries, who as an artists-and-repertoire executive at Elektra signed Keineg to her first recording contract. "She projects this combination of strength and fragility. It's really quite spellbinding: there she is, climbing these heights, and you have this fear she won't get there, but she always does." Keineg's three full-length albums ("O Seasons O Castles," "Jet" and "High July") and her one EP ("What's the Only Thing Worse Than the End of Time?") have also earned her enviable critical acclaim: Entertainment Weekly described her as a "stunning singer of boundless invention"; Esquire called her 1997 album "Jet" among "the greatest overlooked pop masterpieces of the decade." This summer, she plans to finish recording 11 new songs, which she says she will compile into a fourth full-length album, due out this fall. Keineg will appear at the Living Room in New York City on Thursday.

But despite the bold and sustained originality of her talent, and a moment of early recognition in the mid-90's when her career seemed about to take off, Keineg has not yet succeeded in finding a steady, widespread audience. In fact, 12 years after her sparkling debut, I learned that she was working under much diminished circumstances: After protracted negotiations, she parted ways with Elektra; she was operating without the help of a regular agent or manager; and she was financing her own recording, going into the studio one song at a time whenever she could borrow equipment or the instrumental services of her friends. At this point, she said, she was so frustrated by the whole "multinational" music industry that she was looking for any way she could to avoid the major labels altogether, perhaps by licensing her new album to a small distributor or releasing it exclusively online.

"I'm someone who gets lots of praise from lots of quarters," she wrote in an e-mail message, "but have found it very difficult to fit into the structures that determine people's progress in the music world." In February, I went to Dublin to meet Keineg and to learn how an artist with such prodigious gifts could have slipped so thoroughly through the cracks.

t was a raw, overcast afternoon, a few days before Keineg's 41st birthday, and she was sitting in her living room in Dublin, talking with easy exuberance and impassioned debate about this business of making a musical life, despite the vicissitudes of critical response and the marketplace. Above the rooftops across the street, we could see low clouds scudding over the bald, brown hills of the Dublin range. Inside, it was cold as well — Keineg and I sitting in sweaters and scarves, passing a teapot back and forth and scooting our chairs closer to the space heaters. She saw me look around — at her worn armchairs, the sofas covered with sheets, the fireplace that gave her carbon-monoxide poisoning not long ago. She waved her hands about. "Don't go into the whole cold-garret thing, O.K.? Or the fact that the fridge doesn't work and there's no food in it anyway!"

She laughed and settled back into her chair. "Things didn't turn out exactly the way I'd hoped," she went on to say, "but I'm not sorry, really. I'm actually quite happy — until I run completely out of money, that is. I suppose I could always do soundtracks — you know, like the woman who ruined Eastern European singing forever by doing that whole faux-Balkan thing for the movies — but for half the price!" She laughed again and shrugged. "The whole point is to make a life out of music, isn't it? The people I admire most are the ones who kept going, who kept doing their thing. I mean, Johnny Hooker worked in a car factory. Nina Simone — you hear her music a lot more now that she's dead."

Keineg got her start in the early 1990's, playing gigs along with Jeff Buckley and David Gray at Sin-é, though it was Keineg back then who developed the cult following and packed the house. "Those were wildly popular, almost legendary shows," recalls Jeffries, the former Elektra executive. "Word would get around: 'Oh, my God, Katell's going to be there! You have to go!"' During that time, Keineg played at a Dublin show with U2 and opened for Natalie Merchant at Town Hall, and she appeared with Merchant (who covered one of Keineg's songs, "The Gulf of Araby") on "Saturday Night Live" and "Letterman." A half-dozen labels bid for Keineg's first record contract, and she eventually signed a generous six-album deal with Elektra, largely to work with Bob Krasnow, the chairman who had a reputation for being artist-oriented and turning risk into brilliant success — during his tenure, he made hits of, among others, Anita Baker, the Pixies, Bjork, 10,000 Maniacs and Metallica.

He had a similar vision for Keineg. "Katell fell into an elite group of singer-songwriters like Tracy Chapman and Jackson Browne who had a certain elevated way of expressing themselves," Krasnow says. "I was a great believer." Jeffries, who worked at Elektra for 11 years before leaving in 2000 to become a manager, explains: "When I went to Bob to do the Katell deal, his arms were open wide. He was convinced she was going to be the Next Great Artist. She had everything — great voice, literary ability, emotional capacity, and she happens to be beautiful! I mean, in the musical world I grew up in — the world in which there were artists like Dylan and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, and a public devoted to following them — along came Katell, and she was perfect."

But fate — in the form of personnel changes known to any artist who must use the corporate structure to distribute her work — intervened: in 1994, three weeks before "O Seasons O Castles" was released, Krasnow and most of the other executives who signed and supported Keineg left Elektra; a new regime whose tastes ran toward pop rock and hip-hop took over; and like so many "alternative" artists — Aimee Mann and Wilco, most notoriously — Keineg found herself contractually bound to a label that was plainly indifferent to her music and apparently mystified by how to market albums so defiantly undefinable that they are sometimes filed in record stores under "Folk," "Rock," "Celtic," "World," "Lilith Fair" and even "American Roots."

Certainly, Keineg's rigorous code of aesthetic purity has not helped her in the commercial sphere. She has refused to work with well-known producers whose sound might have guaranteed some radio play because, as she said to me, "I never wanted to make a record where I was just the voice inside someone else's musical envelope; then your record sounds like everything else that producer did, and I wanted my records to sound like my records." When she was under contract to Elektra, the marketing department put no small pressure on her to trade on her appearance, which she resisted as best she could, although for the cover of "Jet" she did finally agree to be photographed by a fashion photographer in the South of France. And while two of her songs were used on movie soundtracks ("Hestia" in "I Love You Don't Touch Me!" and "On Yer Way" in "Virgin"), she has also refused to license her songs for commercial use. Oddly, one company wanted to use her eerie, Bulgarian-accented "Enzo 96" to market its domestic appliances.

Her aversion to the business end of the musical enterprise has also led to a certain indifference to the demands of managing a career. "To do this kind of thing, you have to have the goal and work steadily toward it over the months," she said to me in Dublin, using the inflections of a motivational speaker. "There's a big difference between that and a person who needs all her energy just to get out of bed in the morning!" Indeed, her Web site (katellkeineg.com), which is four years old, is almost never updated; video feeds are perpetually "coming soon." And that neglect of detail sometimes works its way into the music-making itself. When Keineg played on the bill with U2 in front of 50,000 people, she walked onstage and discovered that the battery to her guitar was dead. She is always forgetting to bring extra strings to the studio, and for someone looking to the online world to save her from the corporate maw, it is notable that when I met her, she didn't even own a computer. "I want to kick Katell sometimes," says Jack McKeever, a musician, engineer and producer who has been working with Keineg in his New York studio. "In her day, she could bewitch anyone. But she can be so stubborn and defensive."

Nancy Jeffries, however, argues that Keineg's musical career must be viewed against the backdrop of the decline of the pop-music industry over the last 10 years. "Even after the regime change at Elektra, there wasn't a single person at the label who didn't believe Katell was a great artist," Jeffries says. "But by then, everything was changing. Remember, this was 1994. Everyone was going through that period of worrying their artists weren't pop enough, and Katell is the antithesis of pop. In fact, I think she scared them. The people at the top — the ones who made the decisions about retail marketing and radio money — were just too frightened to put their budgetary priorities behind her.

"Katell was a victim of that, no question," Jeffries concludes. "Pop music was such a vital part of the culture for a long moment in time because there were all these artists who had important things to say and companies realized they could make a lot of money off of them; art and commerce came together, and it was fantastic. But by the time Katell came along, we were at the tail end of that. She was the artist on the fulcrum — this amazing talent who walked in a princess and walked out not a princess."

Between marketing disputes and wrangling with Elektra, seven years would pass before Keineg could exit her contract, win back the rights to her first two albums and return to the studio to make "High July." The album, which has several beautiful songs, nevertheless suffers from its lower-budget production; and when it was released only through a small distributor in the U.K. and Ireland in 2004, it received far less attention than her first two albums. Unhappy with its distribution, Keineg says she hopes to rerelease the album through another distributor in the U.S. this summer. All her music will finally be available on iTunes this month.

Seasons O Castles" and "Jet" were lavishly-produced, lushly-arranged collections that explored musical traditions as disparate as punk, country, bossa nova, traditional Welsh hymn and even spoken poetry; and on both albums, Keineg pushed to the outer limits the range and dexterity of her voice. Beginning with "High July," Keineg's songs have grown sparer, and she is recording her current album on eight-track to two-inch tape, which offers less overdubbing flexibility than digital technology but produces a rich, capacious sound that replicates live performance. "More and more, I like a minimum of ego in a singer," she said to me in Dublin. "I mean, you're trying to get something across, right? If there's a lot of ego, or you're singing through a persona, there's not much transmitting, not much connection."

Keineg may believe ardently in the promise of communication through music, but that doesn't mean she particularly wants to talk about her songs, which are often narrated by a first-person figure who may or may not be the singer herself and which shade at all times toward the elusive: "I've been sleeping in a passageway under the sea," she sings in "Hestia." "I've been crouching in the fireplace, safe amongst the flames." Actually, it's hard to know if those are even her exact words, given her sliding intonations and her insistence on neither including her lyrics in her liner notes nor posting them online, which has prompted some of her more devoted fans to congregate on the Internet to parse their meanings. When asked about her songs, Keineg will often frown, look away or simply shrug, as if she, too, might like to know what they're about. "Oh, you should just make it all up," she said at our first meeting. The idea made her eyes light up. "You could do that, you know! In fact, I could invent a pseudonym and a story for myself, just like Dylan. That's quite appealing, actually!"

Now, sitting in her living room during that cold, gray afternoon, she said: "My songs are personal, but they're also hidden, obscure. They're sort of" — she laughed and waved her hands about her ears — "Dance of the Seven Veils, you know?"

Figuring that if the veils would come down, they'd come down only with time, I moved away from the specifics of her songs and asked what impelled her to keep writing, especially in the face of hard times; lately, she'd been playing small scale gigs and teaching a songwriting workshop in the west of Ireland and considering turning to an old law degree for extra income.

Keineg looked away. Then she wrapped her scarf tighter around her neck. Outside, the gray sky was losing light, and lamps were appearing in the apartments across the way. "Well, I'd like to think that musicians have a function in society," she said carefully. "I studied preliterate music in college, and back then they didn't have a concept of music as an aesthetic pleasure. For them, music had a function — for healing, or to make the rains come, or to exorcise someone." She laughed and clapped a hand over her mouth. "Oh, stop me before I start sounding completely naff!"

I said nothing, hoping she'd go on.

"Well, for me, listening to music is akin to a religious experience; it's the closest thing to a religion I have. I mean, I wouldn't put it in terms of God, because I'm an atheist, but I think humans are hard-wired for religion, hard-wired with a sense of divinity, however you interpret that. There's probably some evolutionary advantage to it — this urge for meaning."

Gingerly, I asked how her own music fit into this.

She tucked her chin beneath her scarf and remained in general territory. "Well, music happens over time the way emotions do. It's an emotional intensifier, isn't it? And the music I love — great qawwali singers like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or the shouters from Georgia — there's an ecstatic element in it, an element of intense emotionality. To me, that's an antidote to ironic, postmodern detachment, which is creeping into pop music and which really frightens me — it strips everything of meaning."

Outside, the line between the mountains and the sky had disappeared, and Keineg and I found ourselves sitting nearly in the dark. "So if music has a function," I said, "what's the function of your music?"

Just then, she stood up, went over to her desk and picked up a book she'd been reading: "Music and the Mind." "Well, the music I like is music a singer needs to sing," she said, idly flipping the book's pages. "You can always tell when someone needs to write and sing."

"What makes you need to write and sing?"

She closed the book and went to her window, gazing down at the street lamps below. "Oh, gosh, I really can't go into that." She frowned and rubbed her forehead. "It's just too internal. I mean, I tend to write about love and loss, and I'm just not going to talk about who I've loved and who I've lost."

Our conversation seemed to throw into sharp relief the central tension of her creative life: how to mine the emotional depths from which her songs derive their power without violating — for marketing, publicity or even a magazine profile — the anonymity she feels is crucial to her ability to write and perform. And her reticence was catching; I was drifting off into abstraction myself. When I finally put it to her bluntly — how could a reader (and, by extension, a wider audience) ever come to know her if she wouldn't talk about the substance of her art? — she put it more bluntly still: "Well, that might be your goal," she said with a half-smile and a determined gaze. "But I'm not sure it's mine. I mean, a part of me just doesn't want to be known by people I don't know."

One day in Dublin, Keineg went over to a friend's home studio to work on songs for her new album. She spent the afternoon recording a cover of a Welsh song called "Y Gwyneb Iau," which was written by the Cardiff band Super Furry Animals. She employed an almost nasal, vibrato-less timbre for the song, which, considering she hadn't written it, she seemed surprisingly reluctant to translate: "Well, it's about loss and, um, heartbreak," she said, looking down at a printout of the lyrics. "The first verse — 'cwyd dy bentan a dos lawr i'r de' — that's about leaving your home. And this line, that means, 'Hey, younger face, the doors are closed to you."' She laughed. "It's a pretty sad song, but it all ends O.K., because — 'golchi'r clwyf sy'n cadw dod yn' — that means, 'Cleanse the wound that will only recur.' You know: You're moving on." It was hard not to hear in this Welsh song an echo of her own peripatetic wanderings through life.

Keineg never had any formal musical training — she can't read music — but in Brittany, where she spent her first nine years, and Wales, where she lived throughout her adolescence, music (mainly as an accompaniment to radical politics) was the air she breathed. Her father, Paol, a Breton poet and playwright of some renown, was a founding member of the Breton Democratic Union party. Her mother, Judith, was a Welsh schoolteacher and, later, an elected representative to Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. "They were militants, socialists struggling for Breton and Welsh independence, and in my early years the revolution was imminent; it was very exciting," Keineg told me. Constantly organizing rallies, conferences and fund-raising gigs, her parents would play the music of what Keineg calls "small struggling countries" — Catalonia, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Brittany and the Basque region — and put on fest-noz, night festivals, that featured traditional Breton music and dancing.

When Keineg was 8, her parents divorced, and her father moved to the United States to teach French at a succession of American universities. A year later, Keineg and her older brother moved with their mother to Penpedairheol, or "top of four roads," a small coal-mining community in the valleys north of Cardiff. Then, as now, the valleys were insular, and as a French-speaking immigrant with a foreign-sounding name, Katell was considered "somewhat strange," she says. "Like my mother, I just learned to do my own thing." But she went to a Welsh school, where she became fluent in a third language, and sang constantly — in school choirs, which were hugely popular in Wales, and also in eisteddfod, a cultural competition for singers, instrumentalists, poets and other performers. Meanwhile, her father, trying to preserve a connection with a daughter he never saw and could barely afford to phone, would send her music: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings of folk music from the 50's and 60's, compilation tapes on which he would include everything from Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie to Joni Mitchell and Amália Rodrigues.

Critics, looking for analogies to convey Keineg's singular sound, have often compared her with female singer-songwriters like Mitchell, Merchant and Sinéad O'Connor, but in fact the musicians who most inspired her when she was young were George Harrison, whose guitar licks Keineg tried to emulate with her own electric guitar, and Robert Plant, whose music she first heard when she sneaked off to the Scala Cinema in Merthyr Tydfil to see "The Song Remains the Same." "It was that pure rock 'n' roll energy," she says. "I was completely transformed. That's what made me want to be a singer."

Mostly to please her parents, Keineg went to the London School of Economics and earned an undergraduate law degree. But as soon as she finished college, she moved back to Cardiff to form a songwriting duo, to play at Sunday night open-mikes and to see if she could get some gigs of her own. Sending off her tapes, she was booked at the Glastonbury Festival, played the international music festival Womad and split her time between Cardiff and London until, having found an agent who managed to line up a month's worth of gigs for her in Dublin, she packed up all her belongings and moved to Ireland at 25.

Keineg has lived in Dublin for the last 16 years, but though the city has had a vibrant musical scene for many years (U2, the Hothouse Flowers, Damien Rice), Keineg has stayed on the fringes of that community and used the city less as a home than as a base of operations for a musical life that regularly takes her to New York, Los Angeles, Cardiff, Brittany, London, Paris and beyond. "I'm part of several communities, really, and so it's hard to choose between them," she said that day in her living room. "My solution has been to move in this never-ending circuit, but that's kind of weird, too." She laughed, lifted her shoulders and brought her hands to her ears in a gesture of surrender. "It's commitment-phobia, I'm afraid. One of my friends always says to me, 'Have you picked a continent yet?"' She looked off, a bit wistfully. "I grew up between two countries, so I suppose duality is in my bones, but more and more I think that I travel too much. I mean, I'm always in transition. Honestly, I don't know what to do with myself when I'm not traveling. But another part of me craves the one place. Frankly, I'm a bit confused."

At the Sin-E Gig in the spring, Keineg was getting ready to play two songs in a group show that had drawn a noisy, capacity crowd. (The last time she played a group show in New York, the singer before her was chased off stage before his encore by an audience member yelling: "Enough! Katell's here!") When she opened with "There You Go," it silenced the crowd and brought even the bartenders to a standstill. For her second offering, Keineg sang a medieval Breton drinking song. Perhaps five centuries ago, this song might have inspired boisterous thumping of wood-planked tables with mugs of ale. Keineg used it to evoke a different mood. Singing a cappella, thrumming the body of her guitar for accompaniment, she converted it into a kind of wild, guttural dirge. With her eyes half closed, her body nearly convulsing with the effort to produce the sounds of medieval Breton, she seemed to be wailing some ancient lament, channeling five centuries of sorrow.

"Have you read 'Technicians of the Sacred'?" she asked me a few weeks later when I mentioned her performance of the song. Throughout the time I spent with Keineg, both in Dublin and New York, I noticed that whenever I asked about her songs, she'd refer me to a book: "Music and the Mind," "Technicians of the Sacred"; once, it was a study on the convergence of Cubism and Einstein's theory of relativity. "Anyway, it's an anthology of poetry from preliterate societies. It's quite beautiful. A lot of it is incantatorial, like music."

We were sitting in the lobby lounge of the Algonquin Hotel. The next day, Keineg would be heading back to Dublin, and from there she wasn't quite sure — maybe she'd stay in Ireland, maybe she'd move back to Wales or London. Still thinking about her performance of that medieval Breton song, I asked why her reticence didn't seem to interfere with the emotional openness of her writing and performing.

"Well, I guess it is a bit weird, getting up onstage and emoting — not that my songs are autobiographical!" she cried, holding her palms out. "But at a gig, the exposure, the emotion, is through the conduit of a song. And, most important, it's not just me; there's an audience participating; we're all there in the room together. That's where the contact is. That's where the religious element is."

"What does that mean, 'the religious element'?"

Keineg screwed up her face and tugged at her hair. "Oh, God, it's impossible to talk about this without sounding completely New Age, you know?" She drew in a breath. "O.K., well, it's something beyond words, really. It's about altered states. For me, a great gig is one where, when it's over, I'm elated but I can't recollect any of the details. And hopefully it's a two-way thing: if I'm there and present and open — deeply absorbed, that is — then others will be, too. It's all about the communal presence."

"So is that the function of your music — to create a communal presence?"

She smiled and paused, seeming to measure out her words in advance. "Oh, God, this will sound terrible, and I'm sure I'll regret saying it — I guess the whole Dylan thing's never going to work now! — but I guess the function of my music is.. . ." She looked down and covered her face with her hands. Then she looked back up and said, "Well, I guess its function is to transcend loneliness."

Whose, I asked, hers or the audience's?

"Both, really. I mean, loneliness is the great disease of our society, isn't it? Western capitalist society is so atomized, so fragmented; it's all about the individual." Her eyes were wide, and she was tapping the tabletop with her finger. "And as a result we're sinking into a deeper and deeper state of anomie. But that goes against our social natures. We're apes. We're made to live in groups, to live collectively."

She took a sip from her drink and, finding herself perhaps beyond where she'd intended to go, plunged ahead. "I remember when I was 11, my stepfather had a 45 of 'Eleanor Rigby."' She laughed at the memory and talked right through it: "I listened to that song over and over. I was utterly fascinated, I kept picturing Father McKenzie and Eleanor Rigby, these two desperately lonely people, which is a bit strange, if you think about it, for an 11-year-old. That was the year I got my guitar, and the first song I wrote was an hommage to 'Eleanor Rigby.' I called it 'All the Lonely People."'

At the Algonquin, music had been playing in the background, and suddenly Keineg looked up. "Oh, God, I love this song! It's Etta James's 'At Last.' It's just so beautiful.

"Anyway," she went on, leaning forward, "it's like those gigs my parents used to organize in Brittany. Alan Stivell — he'd come and perform rock versions of traditional Breton songs, and you'd see literally thousands of people — all of them chain-dancing, all of them linking arms and dancing the same steps." Her eyes were shining, and she held her hands up, conjuring the scene. "It was completely exhilarating. And at end of the night, the kids' job was to go around and stack the metal chairs." She smiled and placed her hands, one on top of the other. "I just loved to stack those chairs."