ONE moment she was part of the alternative anti-folk scene, making homemade lo-fi records in her bedroom – the next Kimya Dawson’s songs were at number one in the US album charts courtesy of the soundtrack to this year’s hit teen-pregnancy movie Ju
no.
At 35, after several years of performing with Adam Green in their band The Moldy Peaches, Dawson might have felt she was overdue her quota of fame. But this shock-haired singer/songwriter, who has been performing solo for the last couple of years, has been somewhat overawed by the exposure as her previously intimate, casual gigs have become instant sell-outs.
“I’m totally scared,” the New York Times reported her as telling an audience in Brooklyn this January at a sold-out afternoon show open to all ages. “Literally all ages: among the toddlers in attendance was her 17-month- old daughter, Panda, whom Dawson breast-fed backstage while explaining her fears of getting too famous too fast,” noted the NYT.
“I don’t like people seeing me on the street and freaking out. It’s never what I wanted,” said Dawson, whose punk background and dress sense makes her the antithesis of the perfectly preened pop starlet.
“Because of the success of the album, people have all these expectations of what the next steps are for me,” said the singer, who has been based in Seattle since moving there from New York in 2005. But given she had no manager, no booking agent and was relying on her website (
kimyadawson.com) for promotion, no-one was really quite sure where her clumpy-shoes-shod feet would take her at all.
To Scottish fans’ delight, her journey has led her here this week and she’ll be performing in Edinburgh’s Cabaret Voltaire tonight and the ABC2 in Glasgow on Wednesday.
With a unique style, simply stated lyrics and almost-child like voice in which she explores real life experiences from the sweet to the gritty, witty and off-beat, Dawson has developed a cult following, many of whom are sure to turn out for her Scottish dates, alongside newer fans who fell in love with her music thanks to the sweetness of Juno’s theme tune Anyone Else But You.
It was Ellen Page, star of Juno, who suggested that Moldy Peaches would be her character’s favourite band. So taken was director Jason Reitman with the sound, he used nine of Dawson’s tracks in the movie.
Sadly as, has happened before in the music industry, some obsessive fans have been dismayed to see their underground heroine undergo a sudden rise to fame and – gasp – mainstream popularity.
However, while music snobs are weeping over their rare vinyl, the rest of the world will be delighting in the infectious enthusiasm of this woman, who’s been known to perform songs wearing lion facepaint and has knuckle tattoos that read “LAFF LOUD”.
The full article contains 499 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
