1/6/2009
VenusZine
Jessie Kilguss gets real and unreal on Nocturnal Drifter
By Beverly Bryan
Jessie Kilguss began straying from a career in theater when she toured in the ensemble of The Black Rider, a musical written by William S. Burroughs and scored by Tom Waits. While Kilguss was part of its production in 2005, Marianne Faithfull was also featured in the cast. “It was a dream project to be included on,” Kilguss says, having long been a fan of all three. The troupe also included singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara and many orchestra members who had played with Waits. The influence of so many artists from outside the theater made an impression on the classically trained actress. In particular, Kilguss remembers the way O’Hara would alter the melodies of her songs every night. “I was way more interested in the music aspect than the acting. My interest in acting was starting to fade anyway,” she says. The path onto which the actress strayed now finds her self-releasing her second album, Nocturnal Drifter.
With her music, Kilguss says that she wanted to do something where she could be creatively in charge. The opportunity came in the form of an introduction to previous co-producers of Debbie Harry and Rufus Wainwright, Barb Morrison and Charlie Nieland of Super Buddha. The trio began work on an album of cover songs. While covers like The Black Rider’s “I’ll Shoot the Moon” made it onto 2007’s Exotic Bird, with encouragement from Morrison and Nieland, Kilguss soon found that she preferred writing original material. She and Super Buddha — who play most of the instruments — have been writing songs together ever since and have been developing an aesthetic they can all “plug into” in the process.
On Nocturnal Drifter, released January 6, that aesthetic can be described as an intense and atmospheric approach to pop music that is, she acknowledges, a bit dramatic. But drama in Kilguss’ music means more than vocal flourishes. She goes into the studio with a tape of herself singing and playing piano and an idea of how she wants a track to sound. But she also often brings Morrison and Nieland a narrative or characters for each song. For instance, “Wishing Well,” which has not yet been released, is written from the perspective of Zelda Fitzgerald, as she succumbed to schizophrenia in her later life. “It comes from a place of emotional truth, in that I imagined myself in her position — going mad. [It’s] very much informed by my background in acting,” Kilguss says.
However, she avoids saying where the personal ends and the invented picks up, “Everything that I’ve written has an element of the real and an element of the imagined,” she says. “A lot of times I start with something personal and embellish it or use it as a building block and build something new out of it.”
Live performance is another situation where Kilguss works the boundary between being and pretending. With her band the Steves, she regularly performs in New York, where she has lived on and off for the past 10 years. Singing her own words — rather than those written by someone else — can leave her feeling exposed. “I’ve started to think about performing my songs from the perspective of somebody else so I can feel more at ease doing it,” she says.
However more daunting it may be, Kilguss finds performing in rock clubs still has some similarities to performing in a full-fledged stage production: “It takes the performer and the audience both to create the experience and it’s never the same.” And, she says, it’s always exciting.
For more information, check out Jessie Kilguss' MySpace
Jessie kilguss - nocturnal drifter
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