'SOLO IN A DUET? THINK OF IT AS POETRY'
by Bernard Zuel
24th March 2007,
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
To quote 'Roll You Sweet Rain', a song on her impressive debut album, you could say Kate Fagan is "foolish and reckless" for choosing the career paths of poetry and folk music; both are almost guaranteed to leave her penniless. What was she thinking?
"I don't think I was thinking at all; I was feeling," laughs Fagan. "I've always had a real love of both sound and language and I've worked very much in both areas. Sometimes I feel like words and language have been my work but music is my breath; they are pretty hard to deny. And, yes, it is foolish, and that's part of it, you know. Living is foolish.''
Fagan, a member for most of her life of her family's band, The Fagans, with her parents and brother, is also an internationally published poet with two collections and a concurrent job editing an American journal of innovative poetry. Reviewing one of her poetry collections, one critic said: "Silence and nothingness mingle with the world, with otherness, with the bodies of lovers, to produce complex and engaging fugues.''
Last year Fagan self-released her first solo album,
Diamond Wheel , which easily and attractively blended country and blues into the folk. It won her not just praise but the
National Film & Sound Archive National Folk Recording Award for best folk album, which in turn helped secure national distribution for a reissued, repackaged version of that album.
Clearly there's genuine talent here, in both disciplines, and Fagan doesn't see the need to choose one over the other.
"Those things kind of took hold, they're just responding to the state of being alive,'' she says. "In my view we get one crack at life and there are many different ways you can navigate what being is about, and for me those two came up pretty early in my life and I've been playing some kind of duet, or maybe just a roulette, with both of them."
It's easy to see from her album and her published poetry that the two disciplines complement each other.
"To me they are extensions of the same thing,'' Fagan says. "One of the things that attracted me so much to folk music in all of its incarnations is its responsivity to lyric: it's a lyrical form.
And poetry and folk are really close friends, there is a lot of conversation between them.
Getting that collision of feeling and thought and sound and words really interests me. [Poetry and music] are not that different.''
She mentioned earlier that both forms "took hold'' early in her life. Just how early?
"Probably very early. I was, I guess, fortunate in the sense that there was a lot of music and poetry in the family I grew up in, so I had some interesting coordinates for starting out on that adventure.
It was never presented to me as a kid as anything spectacular or unusual, it was always completely OK to express yourself in that manner. It's what we did.
"My brother and I started performing with my family as really young kids. We would be sitting in the car on the way to a gig and we would be chiming in extra harmonies, and then we just started doing that on stage, probably when I was eight or nine.
I remember at the same time I was really interested in books and words, and from about five or six I started to make little books, drawing and writing stories. Something was going on.''
Something was going on, and it stuck with her. "That experience of performing as a family has shaped me as a performer, but also shaped a sense of adventure and travel, and that it's OK to travel to the end of the earth for a great gig if necessary. Or just to follow a particular inclination, no matter how wild it is.''
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