She was a little slip of a girl and she rarely spoke a word. Marianne Keith was six years old, and she didn’t even dream of singing.
She’d had an ear problem that had affected her ability to talk and had made her painfully shy. But her older sister liked to sing, and one day when Marianne was tagging along with big sister, the music director at their family’s church asked if the little girl could sing him a song.
“No,” Marianne said quietly.
He gently cajoled her, asking her just to sing a little snatch of “Happy Birthday.” So Keith sang, tremulously. The music director was astonished at the sound that came out of the girl’s mouth. He immediately made her a soloist in the choir, and before she had time to even understand what was happening Keith found herself on a stage in front of a packed room of adults.
It was Christmastime and she sang “Happy Birthday, Jesus.” People in the audience openly wept.
“I just remember the feeling, mostly,” Keith said in an interview this week. “I have an image of being on stage under this light and just the feeling of everybody listening. I remember looking into the audience and seeing the way it touched people. That kind of reaction affected me, and stuck with me…I didn’t understand why people were in tears but I liked it. I liked that they were moved.”
Keith knew from that moment onward what she would be in life. It wasn’t even as if there was a choice: she was a singer. And even now, a little less than two decades later, with two records on Johnny Depp’s Unison Music label behind her and a long string of roadhouse gigs in front of her, Keith’s qualities as a singer have broadened but not fundamentally changed: her voice raised in song impacts people because of its quicksilver flights from utter frailty to outright strength. She sings tender songs that can punch you quite directly in the gut.
“I think that it is true – there is strength in frailty,” Keith said. “It goes along with the idea – the more I live, the more I learn, the less I know….The more I find out, the less I’m found. I’m lost, but I’m still able to draw strength from that at the same time.”
Keith arrives in Hermosa Beach Saturday night at Saint Rocke at the end of a 30-city cross-country tour with Joe Firstman and Trey Lockerbie on which she has begun to learn a similar lesson: less is more. Keith’s innate musical gift can also be a curse – she can sing anything, and she often does. Among 30 different videos on her website, for example, are covers ranging from Patsy Cline to Beyonce, from John Mayer to Tom Waits. And her most recent record, Cathartic, frequently finds Keith’s voice enmeshed in high-production pop machinery that somewhat mutes the power of her songs more simply sung.
That power has come through on the road. Firstman, a former Atlantic Records artist whose own sound has steadily been stripped down to something simpler and more true, said that night in and night out, Keith’s performances have riveted audiences. He said he even learns from her ability to lay it all on the line every single performance.
“She sings strong and believes it even when there’s nobody there,” Firstman said. “I take notes every night. It’s easy to understand how strong the writing is once you hear her sing in person.”
But Keith said that Firstman also gave her some hard truths.
“This record presents you as this pop star with a major label behind you, but that is not who you are,” he told her. “You are a gypsy who goes out and roughs it on the road – that’s more the story of who you are.”
She has taken the advice to heart.
“That has probably been my biggest curse from the beginning, because I could do any style, and I recorded in a lot of different styles – I really haven’t narrowed myself down, ‘Okay, this is going to be my sound,’” Keith said. “That has been the hardest part. The last record, I was happy with the way it came out, but some people – including my family – said, ‘This is good, but it’s just not as good as you live.’ And it took me a while, because I was thinking maybe we just weren’t capturing something, but then I really started listening and realized it really is a beautiful record, yet it is taking away what is special, kind of watering down the rawness and emotion of it.”
What audiences are witnessing, then, is a truly emerging artist. Keith, unadorned, is finding her voice. Alone with her guitar in a hotel room in Tempe, Arizona this week, Keith used her laptop to record one of her newest songs, “Charlotte.” It’s as powerful as music gets. Keith’s singing has that earthy, gorgeous swoop that Bonnie Raitt sang with when she was 20 years old, and the song itself is sharply written meditation on the illusions of unconditional and romantic love.
And then, the next night, Keith did something different – she went on stage without a drop of makeup on. It was something more than symbolic: strength in revelation. Like her music, she wasn’t hiding anything.
“I’ve been wearing makeup since 8th grade,” she said. “That is normal. That is part of being a girl….So when I went up there I actually felt like a different person. It was really feeling also this sense of humility, too, and I think I felt more like myself than I’ve ever felt. …I felt completely naked.”
It might seem like a small thing, but we turn to music, to singers, for emotion, for human resonance. It’s perfectly natural for a singer to put on a mask, to play a character – as Dylan sang, “I’m not there,” – but there is a special power when every last shred of pretense is pulled aside. Not many have the guts to even aspire towards it.
Keith has been doing this by stages since she started performing. She recalled, as a teenager, she and her mother went to a pawn shop in her hometown, Redlands, to trade in a clarinet for a guitar. She got ripped off – the pawn shop gave her a cheap old nylon string guitar for a $500 clarinet – but the guitar gave her a means to start writing her own music. She knew from the outset she wasn’t going to be the next Brittany Spears.
“I felt I had something to say,” she said. “I didn’t know what, exactly, but there was something. I was singing to get it off my chest, whatever it was. I felt I had some kind of perspective I needed to share.”
She played everywhere, from old folks homes to farmers markets to bars. She attended college at Cal State Fullerton but left shortly before graduating when she was offered a spot on a national tour. Her family wondered at what she was doing, but Keith was following what she had known would be her path ever since she took that stage as a six-year-old.
“Everybody says you need a backup plan,” she said. “I just realized you need to not have a backup plan. Because people who have backup plans end doing their backup plans….You take a leap of faith. If you fail, you fail. You are still a musician if that is what you are meant to do.”
It is what she’s meant to do. Keith soon landed her record deal, and in 2008 was named “Best Folk Artist” by the Orange County Register. She drew comparisons to everyone from Carole King to Katy Perry. But over the course of the last year, she took the path less often chosen among most female songwriters – she packed herself into a truck with a bunch of scruffy male musicians and hit the road for two decidedly lo-fi national tours.
After this last tour, she is returning to California with a new set of songs and a coalescing idea of what her next record will be. One senses that this next record will be her biggest revelation yet.
“It’s been six weeks but I feel like I am five years older,” she said. “I feel like I am having these experiences on the fast track. I do feel like I am emerging. The last four years of my life have been just major, major changes…but making these leaps, it’s cool and scary at the same time. I am not taking the easy road.”
Marianne Keith performs at Saint Rocke Dec. 4 with Joe Firstman, Trey Lockerbie, and Eric Nelson. See www.mariannekeith.com for more info. ER
