Keren Ann
International chanteuse Keren Ann brings the swirl of her life and influences together in her music in a manner reflecting not only the scenes and emotions of her life and, but also her unifying musical sensibility: Calm. She has gained a lot of attention with this breezy and airy approach, with 2004’s “Nolita” and her most recent recording, “Keren Ann,” released in 2007. Born Keren Ann Zeidel to a Javanese-Dutch mother and Russian-Israeli father, the French singer divides her time between Paris and New York — place is very important in Keren Ann’s music, with the musical notes functioning as reminders of physical spaces she has inhabited. Keren Ann goes on tour in February to inhabit further spaces.
SB: Do you see yourself living in New York City permanently?
KA: Permanently with a suitcase and a guitar and a tour bus or some hotel in some town somewhere around the world. I’m touring all the time, but I do have a place in New York where I can land and write and draw and I do have a similar place in Paris. Both places are very small, but they don’t look like hotel rooms, so at least I do have places to put stuff and go back to it, not that I get very attached to objects, I gave this up a long time ago.
SB: Did you spend your childhood planted in one place?
KA: We moved a lot. My life as a musician and my parents’ lives as just a couple moving from one country to another are about the same—about the same time is spent on planes and trains. We did move a lot from Holland to Israel to France. Before I was born they had been to Mexico.
The funny thing is it wasn’t about the moving, it’s not about exploring or anything, it had to do with business opportunities for my father, but it was more in my family and the life I lead and the identity never went through what land your on, what town you were born in, Catholic mother, Jewish father, everything was mixed up. I gave up a long time ago trying to find an identity that goes through either tradition, religion, or nationality. I think that’s why I love New York so much.
SB: New York City is formless, it’s what you make of it.
KA: New York is a place for rootless and rootful people. Today, especially, people can travel and explore without even leaving their homes, because there are other ways. I guess being a musician you just have to understand at some point that you stop looking for your roots or you just know them and carry them. It’s very easy to go places and, then, wherever you’re at, you belong somewhere else, but New York it doesn’t matter if you belong here, you can just park for awhile. When you finally meet a real New Yorker who’s been here through the years and through the eras, through the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, he speaks to you about New York and it feels like he’s speaking about today, so it doesn’t even have a time cycle.
SB: How do different places manifest themselves in your music?
KA: It’s a very large question, there could be tons of answers to that and there could be — because everything, whether it has to do with the life you lead or the situation you put your finger on or the emotions and how they come out two years later in some work you do or they never come out or you just deal with them or places you want to disappear from or places where you’ve loved and then you don’t want to remember, and then places where you get attached further. There are long, long lists of things that could be reasons for why places appear in what you do and affect you as a person. I think it has to do with a certain sound than with my writing. In terms of my writing, I write the things that I carry and sometimes I don’t write about them right away, they’ll come out in a different form right away, whether I’m drawing or talking, and then some days they will become something that is related to my work.
In terms of the sound, I do relate to situations through sound and through a mood and I try to recreate that in terms of productions. In “Nolita,” the songs where the situation took place in France and they are sung in French, for me, in terms of tone and in terms of frequency, they have a French environment. The songs that related to situations that I’ve lived in English, in the US, have a tone and an atmosphere and an environment that have to do with places here. For example, in “Que n’ai-je” I can actually hear my neighborhood in France and “Chelsea Rooms,” for me, is nothing else but here.
In terms of the writing, writing is a bit timeless, you can write today about things that belong two or three years ago, or 30 years ago, because that’s where your emotion gets to it, but in terms of sound, it’s very closed to what you live at the moment. Something that relates to every single one of my records and every single one of my songs is the word mellow, because I am attracted to certain mellow sounds, which is a very simple thing. You can do folk and do mellow, you can do rock and do mellow, you can do blues and do mellow, doesn’t necessarily mean sad or down or bluesy, it’s a sort of sound atmosphere that your ears are attracted to, very simply. There are chords on guitar that you’re attracted to when you play, so I guess that would be a way to describe the music more generally.
Today it’s not like there’s so much access to music and even for musicians, even if you want to cut yourself from the world and not listen to anything but things from the beginning of the 20th Century, like if I want to cut myself from everything and decide, from today, for a month, I will only listen to Chopin and Chet Baker, I will still have sounds and songs. Music is so much everywhere and there are so many genres, it’s very accessible, so whatever enlightens you you try to explore and it doesn’t necessarily have to be, for example, that I have to decide to do a folk record or a blues record or a rock record, because that would be a strategy that I wouldn’t be able to hold onto
because even in the same day I have two different needs and sometimes like to work on a song that is very mellow and folky and that night, I’ll just want to program and do something more rhythmical. I guess it’s just you take your music how your ears are attracted to.
SB: How has Serge Gainsbourg been an influence to you?
KA: As much as you can listen to all of his records and they are all different styles and different genres and even on the same record, you will have three different directions, you can still put two bars of anything he’s done and know right away that it’s him, it’s his sound. I guess the identity of this sort of music through the sound, not only the voice and not only the way its mixed right and left, it’s not like you can recognize Mitchell Froom, it’s just the personal sound that his ears wanted to hear and you relate to it because it’s his thing.
SB: Francoise Hardy has had a direct impact on your music and career.
KA: She’s a very very close friend of mine. The first notes I heard was her voice that was in her songs, and my mom’s a big fan and she was studying French when she was 18, before she married my dad, she was really into French ’60s music, but for me French music, it is not a big thing, French music, there are two people, there are Serge Gainsbourg and Francoise Hardy. I wouldn’t swear by any other name, there is so much crap and shit, there is some good stuff and there has been for years, but in terms of career and in terms of development and in terms of every album having something new to offer, these are the two artists that I love.
I met Francoise Hardy by a funny chance and became friends and for many years, people expected us to work on a project together and it was just too expected and too obvious that we never did. We happened to become friends and she’s one of the most fantastic ladies I’ve met.
SB: Was she an influence of yours prior to meeting?
KA: We never talk about it, but journalists have definitely written about it and I’ll trust them on that.
I think that what I really liked about her is that, as a teenager, I could listen to her, I could listen to Carole King, I could listen to Joni Mitchell, I could listen to Billie Holiday, and then I could listen to her again and there was something in her sound and in her singing that wasn’t just listening to American singers and French singers, it was just listening to music altogether. Especially in the ’60s, a lot of French artists, it was based on the creation of an icon or the creation of a style, but she just had her own way of loving production and sound and I think what made her. They didn’t search for a French sound, they wanted to work with English engineers and have their own British sound or the mixture of the two became what it became, but it was very different from all the rest.
SB: What is your relationship with America?
KA: There is something about America, and I don’t know if it’s because of where it is situated on the planet or because of the power of such a new country. When you’re in Europe, you feel safe, you feel like the world is watching over you — you don’t feel safe, protected, but you feel you are in a land and there is something above you that is watching over you, not because it’s greater, not because it’s bigger, but because you don’t have the pressure of being the greatest. When you’re in America, you feel like you’re watching over the world and it’s not that you have the pressure of the greatest, but you have the liberty of variety. You have crowds for anything and no matter what
you do, you’re sure to find people who will relate to it, whether it’s masses of people or just a few people, that’s a different question. You do have a very open minded, I feel that I’m not playing enormous venues and I’m still touring in small clubs, but I do feel that I have my crowd today.
The danger of it is that I happened to find myself in places where the crowd didn’t really relate to my music, but to other people’s music and I just happened to be there and I just saw how much it is important when you do your thing to play where people are attached to your music because there is something mellow about my music and if I play on a stage that has other artists that have other styles, I’m not expecting the audience to naturally relate to my music and I’m not trying to concur anything, but I do feel I have my own audience.
SB: What are some of the differences you’ve found in being a musician in America and one in France?
KA: You can tour here and you can play a venue and there will be 10 people and you come back a week later and there will be 30 people and come back a week later and there will be 100 people and that’s what happened to me in New York, I played the Bowery Ballroom and it took me a year. They give you a chance and it goes both ways. In Paris, there are many, many things that are positive about how I got to where I got, but the same time, they don’t have as much clubs or venues for music. You can’t really walk into a venue and have five singer songwriters or five bands in a row the same night and listen to music all the time. You’re either playing covers in some piano bar or you put out a record and are trying to book the large venues and it costs you a lot of money. You don’t have the spirit of clubs and music everywhere all the time. It’s not as much a part of people’s everyday life — maybe it is in England, but I don’t think as much as here.
There’s something about music that you can find anything and people are not afraid to go find out, whether it’s someone with a guitar or someone with a dee-jay set, they’ll just go up and understand that we like it, we come, we don’t like it, we don’t come, and you have a choice. They don’t exist in Paris. I was playing guitar in a band and the next time I played was in a big venue when our record came out. There wasn’t anything in between and I think that’s why I came to America. I needed to be able to play all the time and try new songs and old songs in different ways, sometimes with other musicians, sometimes solo, sometimes with a totally different set-up, change things all the time, interact with different varieties of music just to be able to be in the music all of the time.
In order to make music all of the time, I was just recording it, that’s why I made four records in four years because whenever I wasn’t touring, I was just at home making music because the interaction is not as full as it is here.
SB: How does the does the atmosphere in New York City affect your work?
KA: I work without boundaries. I could always be in Paris and take my guitar and play at home, or I’d have my gear and have a friend come over with a violin and play, but it wasn’t out there. You have to really, really constantly look for it and provoke it. Here, it’s everywhere, you can just play a gig and meet people. That’s how I met most of the musicians I play with. Jason Hart, the piano player, came up to me after a gig and said “Can I sit in with you next time, next week?” None of my records were released here then. I said sure and he ended up touring with me all last year and playing with a trumpeter.
This sort of interaction, which you need at some point of your life - I’m not saying that you need it all the time, but at some point of your life, you do need it. I came to a point where I felt there was a gap, because as much as I was making music at home, writing songs, recording, producing, producing other artists, writing songs for other artists just so I can make music all the time, I didn’t grow as a performer. Here, I got to play all the time, play on stage, play in clubs, and I guess I don’t do that anymore as much because I have been on tour, but I felt that I needed this at that point in my life when I came here.
I have a lot of interest in production work, I have my own studio, I love the production part of it, but touring America has made me wander, I’m in New York and my recording studio is in Paris and I do have all the recording devices I need here, but they’re all packed in the closet. What I like doing now is playing songs on the guitar.
SB: When did you first realize you wanted to be a singer?
KA: I don’t know. My sister found a school notebook in a box from when I was six, writing about myself as a flute player and touring, so I guess I unconsciously knew it.
It was very hard because the first record I released in France, at the same time there was released a record that I wrote for another singer. I guess that the song I wrote for him and the way it was explored, this guy sold more than a million - his name is Henri Salvador he’s a legend, a French crooner — and it was very weird knowing that your music is out there and you write for someone else and his record is released at the same time when you sell five records and he sells a million five hundred thousand.
In France, for years, I was known more as a songwriter rather than a singer and it was very frustrating because I had questioned so much about my voice, whether I should sing or not or just sit and write songs, because some songs, they had to be sung by me. So I just stopped writing for other people and concentrated on what I did, and that’s when I really said “Okay, I’m not only related to music, I am also a singer.”
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