Brenda Kahn Articles Page

01/21/01 SITES TO VISIT

	Site	Description
	ARTICLE: Brenda Kahn and WomanRock	Nice article about Brenda Kahn and WomanRock, written by Rene Vasicek in October, 2000.

"Rather than get lost in the Lilith Fair shuffle, anti-industry singer-songwriter Brenda Kahn launched her own Web site (www.womanrock.com), where fans of Jewel-like acoustic balladry will find her fifth recording, Hunger." (--- James Patrick Herman)

How do you categorize a musician who dislikes the whole idea of categorization? Well, if the music is really bad, you just say, "it sucks." Period. But, as in the case of Brenda Kahn (whose music resides at the polar opposite of "suck"), it becomes a bit of a dilemma. In addition to a press release that defies all comers to try and "cage her in some niche," the diversity of Kahn's' influences is eclectic. Drawing from the whole of Manhattan's Lower East Side, you can hear the street level grit of that regions punk clubs, the spoken word arenas and the ever present folk scene. Kahn's latest CD, Outside the Beauty Salon, touches on a lovechild-of-Suzanne Vega-and-Jim Carroll-having-drinks-with-The Clash-while-laughing-at-the-"humorous"-tragedies-covered-in-the-New York Post feeling. Example from the song "Guillotine": "And the captain of the swimming team, ironically drowned in the bath/Trying to go down on the homecoming queen, what a laugh, what a laugh, what a laugh." Now that's a yearbook quote, kiddies. Kahn shows her true love for the dark, urban underbelly and accents it with origami-sandpaper-rose-like vocals; lilting yet scratchy, and a wonderfully tight rock & roll band that knows how to play a folk song too.

Flowery adjectives aside, it's a pleasant, well-needed kick in the backside to the folk/rock scene. Hear Kahn at BAR on Sunday, Oct. 19, 1997. Call 495-1111. (--- Craig Gilbert, New Mass Media)

In college, Brenda Kahn would spend her Sunday nights performing at a space called ABC No Rio, where the regulars included John S. Hall of King Missile, Michelle Shocked and Cindy Lee Berryhill.

"Those were the fun days, when everybody was kind of hanging out, just doing whatever," Kahn recalls. "I think a lot of what I started doing in New York was based on what happened in that room, 'cause every Sunday, it would just be all these crazy people from the neighborhood reading poetry, singing songs or whatever they did. . . . It was like performance art before performance art had a name."

In 1989, a tiny independent New York label, Community 3, released her first CD, the endearingly titled "Goldfish Don't Talk Back."

No sooner had the record hit the streets than Kahn did something most aspiring musical artists would never dream of doing. She left New York for Minnesota, like Dylan but backwards.

"It was great," she says, "I'd been playing New York for so long and New York audiences are really, really hard. They're really jaded and you really have to do a song and dance to impress them. When I got out to Minneapolis, I was so much more of a seasoned performer or whatever that I hadn't realized how much work I had been doing in New York. In Minneapolis, you don't have to try that hard because people are already listening."

The local press embraced her. The local musicians, including the members of Soul Asylum and the Jayhawks, embraced her. The Midwestern club scene embraced her and actually paid her.

So she did what no aspiring musical artist in that position would dream of doing. She returned to New York City, where she found a steady gig at CBGBs. Selling drinks.

"New York's kind of home," she explains. "I can't seem to get that out of my system."

It wasn't a horrible move. While Kahn was selling drinks, her manager managed to sell her music to a new Columbia Records offshoot, Chaos.

While at Chaos, she sold more than 10,000 copies in France alone of an introspective effort called "Epiphany in Brooklyn," while opening tours for the Kinks, Bob Dylan, David Byrne and Jeff Buckley.

But the label folded two weeks shy of releasing the followup, "Destination Anywhere."

Shanachie, an independent label, eventually picked it up, but by then, it was too late to take advantage of whatever legwork Chaos had done before folding.

A second album on Shanachie, "Outside the Beauty Salon," was surprisingly huge in Europe.

"It was such a shock to go over there," she says. " 'cause we toured for a month and every show was sold out. It was all 200 to 300 people at the shows and they were, you know, freaking out."

The sight of all those Europeans freaking out was enough to inspire Kahn to leave Shanachie and set up her own new label, Rocket 99.

"Shanachie's a great group of people," she says. "But they're not a big label and if I'm not gonna do a deal with a big label, it makes sense for me to do it on my own. If you do the math, it's a better situation."

Four of the songs on her new record, "Hunger," including the heartbreaking "Side Step the Bullet," were inspired, she says, by the unexpected death of her friend, Jeff Buckley.

"We were really good friends," she says. "I listened to about 10 seconds of his new record and I couldn't really take much more of it. I turned it off and wrote ['Side Step The Bullet']. I was really affected by that a lot."

Tonight, the woman Alternative Press has applauded for writing "savage and savagely funny tales of desperation and disillusion" brings her tour in support of "Hunger" to the stage of the Electric Banana, with openers Crisis Car and Hungry Bill.

Brenda Kahn is that too-smart-to-be-popular girl you knew in high school whose braininess was ultimately far sexier than the whole cheerleading squad put together. (--- Peter Galvin)

Brenda Kahn is one of those New Yorkers who inhabit a world of losers, junkies, and social terrorists, who write savage and savagely funny tales of their desperation and disillusion. Her third album is focused on the urban detritus, using a backing of lean and feisty rock 'n' roll to get into the very gravel and grit of the streets. (--- Stephen M. H. Braitman)

A partial graffiti bridge between anger and art, Brenda Kahn write about the reality of a generation coming to terms with itself, trying to piece together fragments of a less than perfect life: divorced parents, substance and sexual abuse, a lack of meaningful work. (--- David T. Lindsay)

Merlin's Music Magazine is a Greek music magazine. The June 17, 1993 issue supposedly has an article about Brenda Kahn in it. The cost is $4.00. (62 pages)

Contact Person: Bill Babouris, Apostolopoulou 56, Halandri 15231, Athens, Greece

Buzz Magazine is a freebie Albany-based music magazine. The December 1992 issue has Brenda Kahn as its cover story. Inside is a 2-page interview. The cost is $3.00 US. (32 pages)

What I really learned is that there are cool people everywhere in this country, usually a minority wherever they are, but really aware, involved, interested people that care a lot. Beyond that I am fascinated with contradiction and irony, and a lot of that comes through in the details.

Contact Person: George Guarino, Buzz Magazine, P.O. Box 3111, Albany, NY 12203. Ask for the Dec 1992 back issue ... issue #83 to be exact.

But a fine disdain for convention also informs her quietest, most personal songs --- Kahn's voice curls, cracks, and warps to fit the sentiments, heedless of academic technique. (--- author unknown)

The tone drips with irony, taunting and mocking, evoking a grit and sarcasm reminiscent of the Violent Femmes as the narrator bangs her head against a wall in a fit of despair. (--- Tatyana Mischel)

Kahn lets her disquieting, poetic songs follow a lost generation "anesthetized by violence" in their caffeine-driven searches for love amid desolate emotional and physical landscapes. (--- Rob Spillman)

Articles Archive

Date	Filename	Source	Description
Nov/Dec 1992	eibcreem.zip	CREEM Magazine	Review of EIB album

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