Despite releasing seven albums to critical acclaim, working alongside artists such as Foo Fighters, Mountain Goats, and Eddie Vedder, and being commonly recognized as one of the greatest living guitarists, not a single Kaki King release has appeared on Acclaimed Music. Part of this stems from a critical bias against so-called "technical" musicians, claiming that people like Steve Vai or John Fahey focus too much on precision and not enough on emotion. While it may in some cases be true, this is patently false for Kaki.
Katherine "Kaki" King hails from Atlanta, Georgia (like me!), but has spent the majority of her creative career in New York. Openly lesbian, Kaki felt a sense of alienation growing up in the conservative South. Music provided an escape from that, and those themes appear sometimes in her work.
Kaki studied music at New York University, developing a unique guitar style that utilized both hands with tapping, flamenco, and percussive elements with the guitar's body. (If you've seen the film August Rush, know that August's guitar pieces were all Kaki originals. And in the close-ups of his performances, Kaki's hands were used as a double.) After graduating college, she released her first record, 2003's Everybody Loves You, an entirely acoustic work that showcased Kaki's impressive range with just a single instrument. The album was well-received, but critics focused entirely on Kaki's technical skills (deservedly so), but ignored the emotional resonance that the style worked towards.
Kaki moved briefly to a major label, releasing another instrumental album, Legs to Make Us Longer, which featured her adding to her style, with drums, electric guitar, and slide.
However, Kaki bucked at the implication that she was solely an instrumentalist. She dropped Sony and returned to Velour Records to release ...Until We Felt Red. Her sound took a considerable turn, one that the A.V. club dubbed a "post-rock makeover". Kaki arranged pieces for full bands, manipulated her tone with shoegaze-y effects, and added occasional sting parts. But most notably, Kaki started singing. Several of the songs on the album were just that - songs - rather than instrumentals. Granted Kaki's singing voice nowhere near matches her guitar ability, but she clearly was not an artist to be pigeonholed.
Her next album, Dreaming of Revenge, continued expanding in this vein, alternating between conventional rock songs like "Pull Me Out Alive" and discursive, orchestral instrumental masterpieces like "Bone Chaos in the Castle" or this song, one of my favorites of hers.
Her followup, Junior committed entirely to Kaki as singer-songwriter. By no stretch is the album bad, but I will admit that Kaki's far more experienced as a guitarist, composer, and bandleader than she is as a singer. Nevertheless, the album contains a number of standout tracks.
After some backlash for Junior, Kaki's Glow returned to the instrumental stylings of her fourth record, alternating between sparse but complex acoustic guitar and dramatic post-rock epics.
Her most recent record, The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body, represented another major change to Kaki's style. Kaki suffered from vision problems her entire life, but after releasing Glow, she had corrective surgery. She realized for the first time how unclearly she had seen the world, never seeing sharp details, and was awestruck looking at even mundane things. She decided that for her next record and tour, she needed to utilize the visual element. She collaborated with visual production company Glowing Pictures, crafting an hour long "tribute to the guitar", in which her custom-made celluloid Ovation acoustic was used as a projection screen. She wrote an album almost entirely of solo pieces, each one made for accompaniment by visual projections. Having seen her perform this show at LACMA a few months ago, I must say, it's one of the best live experiences I've ever had.
Anyways, I'm not sure what inspired me to write all this just now, but I'm glad I did, both for me and for hope of introducing more people to this amazing artist. I also managed to put off working on my final project for the semester, so that's nice too.
