Good Times Santa Cruz: Amy Kuney's Journey to Fame
WRITTEN BY CHRIS J. MAGYAR
TUESDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2008
The singer-songwriter from Oklahoma and Honduras on her unusual life
Music is a series of bits and pixels these days. One day, while trolling a site called The Sixty One —which treats new songs by indie musicians like stocks for music lovers to invest in—a tune called “Simple Things” caught my ear. Featuring YAFSS (yet another female singer-songwriter), the song immediately grabbed me with the singer’s perfectly controlled alto laced with that sly Midwestern accent first mastered and popularized by Judy Garland. By the time the line “the sky is tired of being scraped” hit and the hook unfolded like a sunrise tinged with a hint of orange irony, I was already surfing the artist’s MySpace and clicking through to several YouTube videos of her covering Coldplay and Damien Rice . By the accident of a glance, I saw an upcoming tour stop in Santa Cruz … for free?
This process of serendipitous discovery is more orchestrated than it seems—labels place the songs on social networking sites and instruct their young acts to video themselves performing cover songs in order to foster just that sense of proprietary “I’m the one who found this musician” feeling—but what’s remarkable about the story of Amy Kuney , this particular find, is that her life story is as convoluted and sideways as the modern marketing methods that are putting her into the spotlight.
“I started out as a classical piano player for church and all that, and that’s what I always thought I would do,” she says of her early childhood. By the time she was an adolescent, her father had left his day job and took the family to Honduras, stranding young Kuney in a country without much to do or anyone to talk to outside her family.
Young, alone and upset enough at her circumstances that she initially refused to learn Spanish, she turned to writing songs just to pass the time, then found herself in a church salsa band. “I was always in the back,” she says. “It was an all-boy band and they wanted to be the lead singers. I asked the lead singer at one point that, if I learned guitar, if I could be out front. But by the time I learned guitar, I said, ‘Screw them, I’ll go on my own.’ ”
By college age she was back in California (she now lives in Santa Monica) putting together a few songs. She caught a lucky break early and wound up on stage in the background of a "Gilmore Girls" episode, but things started really rolling this year, after college. “I’m always a workaholic and I like things to go fast, but especially during the summer things went fast,” she says. “Getting a song on the season finale of 'One Tree Hill' helped a lot. Kate Voegele mentioned me in People magazine and I started touring with her. I started covering songs on YouTube, which was my label’s idea, and I enjoyed that. I am a huge fan of Damien Rice and I covered one of his songs—‘The Blower’s Daughter’—and one of his fans sent it to him. He liked it, I guess, and wrote a few days later and asked me to come to Iceland. I agreed pretty fast. We left four or five days later.”
The whirlwind tour of Iceland happened just before that country’s infamous bankruptcy, which made for a strange experience. “The economy was pretty crazy over there. The dollar over there had no worth, so we were trying to figure out how we’d survive. We were there right before [the economic collapse] happened. I made some money there selling CDs and by the time I switched it over to dollars it had lost a third of its value. I kind of have a fanbase there now, and they want me to come back because at this point I could live like a queen.”
From Honduras to Iceland, Kuney has evolved into a pop ballad machine, in the mold of such lightning-fast stars as Regina Spektor and Ingrid Michaelson , with twisty and clever lyrics (“Rocket Surgery” shows them off best). But her success is due to more than accident. She says most of her free time is spent responding personally to every e-mail her fans send her, which has led to making friends all over the place. This Halloween, she and some of those friends in Texas went trick-or-treating. “I went for the first time in my life,” she admits. “My parents are Southern Baptist missionaries so I was never allowed to go trick-tor-treating, and the last couple years I was in college I thought, ‘I’m getting up there, so I won’t be able to pull it off much longer.’ So I did it with some friends in a little neighborhood in Houston. The kids are so young, and there was hardly anyone after 9 p.m. I’m used to going out late, so I must have seemed kind of creepy.”
She has also solicited reading material from her fans, and is currently reading “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston, though her next fan recommendation is the teen vampire romance novel “Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer. “I like to communicate with the younger kids,” she says, then laughs. “I feel like an old person talking.”
Courting that younger fanbase—she played mostly jazz clubs and sit-down venues to older crowds in her earlier career—has also meant embracing the digital, so she and her label decided to release her latest album, Bird’s Eye View, in an eco-friendly mini-package. “I wouldn’t call myself a tree hugger or anything,” she says, “but I noticed that when I buy a CD, I take the disk out, stick it in my computer, and throw the package away. I wondered where all the plastic and cardboard go.” She says the CDs are only peddled to the older fans anymore anyway. “Today I played at a high school in the morning, and I just gave out a card about how to get to it on iTunes.”
And the digital whirlwind of music begins anew. But the miracle of this new system is how it’s bringing fans closer to musicians like Kuney, who answer every e-mail, and have an interesting and personal story to tell. Perhaps this is what the future of music is—everything but the fake, fancy package.