More on: Dawn Kinnard

Born in Pennsylvania, singer/songwriter Dawn Kinnard was a member of her church choir, of which her father was the preacher. Kinnard, influenced by Elvis and sounding like Billie Holiday, travelled across the US on a Harley for inspiration, before winding up singing in Nashville. There she would meet her manager Martin Terefe, and Cerys Matthews who guests on the resulting album 'The Courtesy Fall', out now.

Now based in London, we catch up with Kinnard for a quick chat.

When did you first realise your vocation as a singer/songwriter?
I guess when I started listening to a lot of music, I began to feel inspired to sing as well. I started singing along with records, then I thought I'd get a guitar so I'd have something to sing along with other than records. That led to singing in bars, and it kept on progressing from there.

Your songs were inspired by road trips across the US - what was the strangest thing to ever happen to you?
I would say the strangest day would've been... I had been riding for two days straight, and I had made it from Pennsylvania to Arkansas. I was just going to sleep on the ground as I had bought a tent with me. As I was setting up the tent, there was a really... you know those moments when the air seems quite still? It was one of those moments where everything was too still. I pulled into this campground where nobody was, and even the talking seemed strange. I checked into the campground - it was just a circle and I could set up my tent anywhere, and there was this wing, and a bench and a man just rocking on it. I hadn't talked to anyone in a long time, it had been a couple of days of silence, and there was a man just sitting there, and he had one arm and a little black dog, just rocking back and forth. So I was setting my tent up, in front of him basically, and he started to, you know, comment on things. Then it was "there was a girl two weeks ago who was murdered off the side of the highway", and I was like, "oh, that's good to know, thanks!" It kind of struck me, when I was walking round in circles at the campsite, and I ended up at a truckstop for the evening. That inspired me to write a song about the girl, even though I had never met her, obviously. The girl was also travelling alone and had a dog. But the whole scenario was quite odd.

How did you come to record your album in England?
I was playing in bars around the States, and basically there was one bar I was playing in Nashville. The owner of the bar said his friend had asked him to introduce him to any singers he thought he would like, so he introduced us, and he ended up being my now manager. He flew me over to record a couple of songs and see if we hit it off. We weren't planning on making a whole record, so there was no pressure. It was great to work like that. Then we ended up making a whole album as it went really well. We didn't have to speak about anything - it just happened.

Has being here influenced your writing at all?
Yeah! One of the songs I wrote when I was recording when I was staying in a hotel in Bayswater for about three weeks. There was quite a bit of time in a hotel room by myself, which is where I felt the inspiration to write a song called 'Clear The Way' that's on the album. I wanted it to be a duet, because I was by myself. Definitely being in London... I was going around London and some of the lyrics I just abstractly picked up from things I was seeing, like the churches and steeples - basically visual. That was definitely a London inspired song.

How did you meet and come to collaborate with Cerys Matthews?
I met her husband [Seth Riddle] in Nashville first. Cerys and I had randomly ended up recording at the same studio in Nashville, as I was doing some demos there. There was a building in Nashville where they basically mixed lots of records, and in the basement every week they played poker. So I was down there playing poker, and I met Cerys's husband, and he was "oh I think you'd hit it off with my wife". We ended up living a block away from each other, so we would sit on the porch a lot and play guitar, and barbeque and things like that! That's how the song 'One Little Step Away' came about.

Becky Reed

Dawn Kinnard Official Site
Dawn Kinnard Myspace