Dayna Kurtz started performing her own compositions while still in her teens, and the hunger for lost songs and forgotten voices has been a constant throughout her career. She is drawn to artists who fell through the cracks — particularly the mid-to-late 1950s and early 1960s, when genre lines hadn't hardened yet and storefront labels pressed brilliant records that only a handful of people ever heard. Finding and resurrecting those songs has been as central to her work as writing new ones.
Her early albums established her international reputation. Postcards from Downtown put her on the map in Europe and became a Top 20 seller in the Netherlands, culminating in sold-out shows at Amsterdam's Paradiso that were captured on her first DVD. One Danish magazine's five-star review of that debut called her "a unique phenomenon in the musical landscape" — not a female answer to Tom Waits, Chris Whitley, or Ryan Adams, the reviewer insisted, but something else entirely: a blend of European vaudeville and American folk that gave her love songs an unexpected grandeur. The comparison that stuck was Billie Holiday, though the reviewer heard a cooler, more introverted melancholy in Kurtz's phrasing, and marveled that her small band of accompanists could conjure an orchestral sweep out of almost nothing. She was named Female Songwriter of the Year by the National Academy of Songwriters, earned rapturous praise from Norah Jones and Bonnie Raitt, and appeared on World Cafe, Mountain Stage, and NPR's Morning Edition. She has toured with and opened for Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, Rufus Wainwright, B.B. King, Dr. John, Richie Havens, and the Blind Boys of Alabama, among others. Best-selling author Steve Almond devoted an entire chapter to her in his book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life.
That restlessness defines her catalog. The simultaneously released American Standard and Secret Canon, Vol. 1 captured both strands of her musical DNA at once: one rooted in rock, country, and Americana — including sessions with Sun Records rockabilly legend Sonny Burgess and his band, the Legendary Pacers — and the other in smoky mid-century R&B and jazz. A track on American Standard was cut in New Orleans with the Nightcrawlers brass band; the Secret Canon original "Not the Only Fool In Town" was recorded with George Porter Jr. of The Meters and pianist David Torkanowsky. Both records were funded almost entirely by fans who contributed directly through her website. Longtime drummer and co-producer Randy Crafton has been her most consistent collaborator throughout.
Kurtz came to New Orleans from Brooklyn drawn by the music she loved — R&B, blues, jazz — and the move proved transformative. The city's musicians, she has said, have a different feel for time than players elsewhere; they lean back on two and four and lock in differently, and that quality seeped into her writing. Postcards from Downtown, now being remixed by Crafton for its vinyl debut — restoring sections left out of the original, including unheard vocal improvisations by the late Richie Havens — remains the foundation of her reputation, even as her writing has evolved toward the topical: a gospel song for agnostics, an ecological lament whose chorus warns that losing New Orleans means losing everything, and songs responding directly to the present political moment.
She has long performed solo or with a piano player, but a new chapter opened with her musical partnership with guitarist Robert Maché. The two are also members of Lulu & the Broadsides, a rock band that brings out a different side of Kurtz's personality — though Lulu is currently on hiatus. As a duo, Kurtz and Maché have been touring behind Postcards from Downtown, with Maché handling onstage guitar retuning while Kurtz introduces the songs. Ask her audience for requests and the pattern holds: they want the slowest, saddest things she's ever written. She has her theory about why. "Either my followers are all depressive," she says, "or it's just that those songs tend to resonate more."
