Kaki King 'Dreaming Of Revenge' album

Kaki King has never been one for convention. The awesomely talented guitarist and singer-songwriter has been leaving audiences & listeners stunned with her unorthodox approach to the acoustic guitar, and her latest album is set continue the trend.

Kaki King has never been one for convention. The awesomely talented guitarist and singer-songwriter has been leaving audiences and listeners stunned with her unorthodox approach to the acoustic guitar, and her latest album Dreaming Of Revenge is set continue the trend.

When her previous album ...Until We Felt Red was released in the UK in November 2007, it was on the back of a wave of unreservedly enthusiastic hype and excitement. Aside from her own music, she has been nominated for Best Original Score at the Golden Globe awards for her soundtrack to the Sean Penn film Into The Wild. King also appeared in Kirsten Sheriden’s film August Rush, performing as the main character's hands and playing his virtuosic guitar parts, and she was the only female player included in Rolling Stone Magazine’s ‘New Gods Of Guitar’. On top of this, she has guested on the Foo Fighters’ latest album Echoes, Silence, Patience And Grace and toured internationally with the band. The rave reviews of ...Until We Felt Red from both fans and critics led her to appear on BBC 2’s Later…With Jools Holland and secured her a full page feature in MOJO magazine.

Kaki King has never been one for convention. Over her last two albums she has matured into a fully-fledged composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist and Dreaming Of Revenge continues to see her develop her musical style. Having enjoyed significant acclaim for her bold departure of a third record, ...Until We Felt Red, produced with John McEntire (Tortoise, Sea & Cake, Stereolab), King found her way from her New York City home to the studios of sonic texturalist Malcolm Burn. She and Burn have created a record that firmly establishes King’s position on the cutting-edge of the post-singer/songwriter movement. Featuring King’s tender vocals, drums, keyboards, lap steel, bass, electric guitar and of course her trademark acoustic playing, this collection of gorgeous and tuneful left-field indie and post-rock is poised to be her breakout success.

Ruthlessly inventive, achingly beautiful and joyously carefree, Kaki King’s music is the result of a seemingly effortless natural gift for crafting songs and melodies that connect with both the head and the heart. Dreaming Of Revenge is a glorious wake-up call from one of the most dazzling musicians around.

press quotes
“the queen of instrumental nu-gaze guitar…dazzling” — MOJO

“a cult guitar heroine on the indie fringes” - The Independent

“laced with sonic invention, look no further” - Guitar Magazine

“I want to introduce you to one of my favourite guitar players in the whole f**king world... There are guitarists who are good and some guitar players who are f**king good. And then there’s Kaki King” -Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, live in concert at the O2 Arena, November 2008

biography
When Kaki King went into the studio in upstate New York to record the tracks for her fourth album, Dreaming Of Revenge, her producer, Malcolm Burn, had one condition: “He said, ‘If someone can’t be sawing a log in half and whistling along to the song, I don’t want it on the record,’” King recalls with a laugh.

And so the bar was set. Burn’s mandate was just the push King needed to make her most accessible CD yet. “Even though half the tracks are instrumentals, I feel like I’m writing pop songs,” she says. “We really concentrated on the melodies. Everything I write tends to be dense and chordal, but this time the idea was to layer the challenging guitar work under very simple, beautiful melodies. I really wanted them to be memorable.”

That strict attention to song craft is a logical step for King, whose previous album, 2006’s …Until We Felt Red propelled this dazzling young guitar player and composer, known to instrumental music fans for her finger-picking, fret-slapping, and percussive thumping style, into previously uncharted indie-rock territory. Produced by post-rock kingpin John McEntire (Tortoise, Sea and Cake), Red was filled with lush, ambient soundscapes that “sound like the abstract, dreamy, and hypnotic end of alternative rock,” as the New York Times noted in its review.

Red found King branching out with songs that featured electric and pedal-steel guitar, horns, and, for the first time, vocals. Dreaming Of Revenge picks up that thread, continuing her evolution from acoustic instrumentalist to full-fledged, multi-faceted songwriter. Previously, her whispery, ethereal voice was used as mainly another element in her sonic arsenal. This time around, King put more effort into both her vocals and the lyrics she wrote for such deeply felt tracks as “Pull Me Out Alive,” “Saving Days In A Frozen Head,” “Life Being What It Is,” and “2 O’Clock,” the latter two of which she describes as break-up songs. “The words mean something now,” she says. “They’re actually telling stories.”

Of course her instrumentals tell stories too. The intricate finger-picked melodies — which she and Burn often doubled and tripled with other instruments — on the airy, sexy “So Much for So Little,” (“a song I think people should make babies to,” King says) and the haunting “Can Anyone Who Has Heard This Music Really Be A Bad Person?” (which was inspired by the Oscar-winning German film The Lives of Others) convey a heavy-heartedness that feels more raw and emotional than anything King’s done before. Those tracks are balanced out by the upbeat, rhythmically layered “Montreal” and the flash-bang ear candy of “Bone Chaos In The Castle,” both of which feature King, who is the drummer on most of the record, supplying the tight, in-the-pocket grooves.

“Making Dreaming Of Revenge was all about challenging myself,” King says. “And it was also about really letting go and opening myself up to a producer who I needed to just trust. I absolutely knew after the first day in the studio that Malcolm was the right man for the job.” Indeed Burn, a Grammy-Award winning musician and producer who is known for his work with Daniel Lanois, Peter Gabriel, and Emmylou Harris, was the perfect foil for King. “I went in with 11 demos and detailed notes about how each track should sound,” she recalls, “and Malcolm took one listen and said, ‘Throw that stuff away. I don’t care how you think it should sound. Just pick up a guitar right now and start playing.’ He was really adamant, because the way he works is totally spontaneous.”

The process may not have unfolded the way she’d planned, but unpredictability has never been a problem for King. An Atlanta, GA, native who moved to New York in 1998 to attend New York University, she got her start busking in the subway where her dexterous playing style attracted the attention of Velour Music Group, which signed her to a management/recording deal and released her debut album Everybody Loves You in 2003. The following year, she released her second album, Legs to Make Us Longer on Epic Records. These releases coincided with what turned out to be years of incessant touring, and King has since notched headlining performances throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia. She’s also become something of a late-night TV darling, performing on the Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and most recently, Later with Jools Holland (UK), impressing fans and critics around the world as her music explores a growing range of emotional spaces.

In 2007, King branched out into film work, composing original music for several scenes in the Sean Penn-directed film Into the Wild, which also features two of her previously released songs. In addition, she recorded two tracks for the film August Rush, in which she appears as a guitar-playing hand double. Aside from Penn, King also has a fan in Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, who asked her to duet with him on “Ballad of The Beaconsfield Miners” from the Foos’ current album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace.

“To have these kinds of opportunities has been amazing,” King says. “Just to know that I can walk into a room, pick up a guitar, and play a piece of music that I’ve never heard before without days of rehearsal — I feel good knowing that I’m being asked to do such challenging things.”

For now, King is excited about the March 2008 release of Dreaming Of Revenge. “I want people to listen to it and think, ‘This sounds like something completely new, but it also sounds like something Kaki King would do,’” she says. “I am finding my own voice within the world of instrumental music at large, as opposed to just instrumental guitar. So I’d love for people to hear it and think, ‘If I had to take a guess, I think Kaki King might have written this song. That would be a dream.”

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Kaki King - Dreaming Of Revenge