Vindication Stomp

Kelleigh McKenzie

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, October 27, 2008

Klump-thump. Klump-thump. Black boots on a flat board. Klump-thump. A twang. There’s a twang. Wiry plucks on a banjo’s neck. A darkness in the air. Dark words in a sweet voice. Words that warn against the dangers of too much drink. Words with a playful edge, a wry bite: “You’re mine, taste my fire / and your walls come tumbling down / You’re fine, I like you better / when you’re crawling on the ground.”

The boots, the voice, the banjo, and the words belong to Kelleigh McKenzie, who’s playing tonight to a packed, rapt room at New Paltz’s Unison arts center. The song, “Gin,” is off McKenzie’s outstanding recent debut, Chances (2008, Zatchubilly Music). There’s a bit of a quirky story behind it.

“I like to think of inanimate objects as having personalities,” says the svelte and striking singer-songwriter. “And the different kinds of alcohol each have their own personality. For instance, whisky is mean. Beer is lazy, slothful. Tequila, of course, is crazy. And gin is sneaky.” Indeed, the song’s sinewy, snaky main riff is a perfect match for the imagery of its cunning lyric. “Gin” is a catchy, clever masterpiece of form meeting function.

In a similar stroke of functional form, McKenzie grew up in a town whose very name mandates the eventual exodus of its youth: Boring, Oregon, an unincorporated logging community whose population topped out at 12,851 in the 2000 Census. “[Boring is] about half way between Portland and Mount Hood,” she says, adding, not exactly surprisingly, “There’s not a lot going on there.” Before her own exodus occurred, however, in addition to learning guitar and absorbing her father’s taste for jazz and the sounds of her older sister’s classic rock LPs, McKenzie inherited her Southern-born grandmother’s fondness for country music—though the latter genre is one to which she was initially resistant. “[Her grandmother] used to listen to the Carter Family and watch ‘Hee Haw’ on TV all the time,” remembers the singer. “But as a kid I just thought it was goofy. It wasn’t ’til later on that I totally fell in love with the classic country stuff, and I’m thankful that she exposed me to it. I always say I got the hillbilly-music gene from grandma.”