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Scott King
Grooving to the Mystery of Songwriting

Brattleboro, Vt,  July 7  -  Little is more hope-inspiring in this line than finding a CD-mailer in our mailbox.  As a rule, people send us records they think are pretty good.  So when we get a record by an artist we know nothing about, such as Scott King, it inspires optimism like the coming of spring or the approach of a Red Sox season.  The artwork of King's new CD cover gives a sense of post-Suzanne Vega singer-songwriter fare, and a sticker says the featured song is Dave Carter's "Frank to Valentino."  Carter was a brilliant guy, and it would be hard to go wrong singing his material.

"Aunt Camilla Brown," the opening cut on Scott King's In Your Head, is more early-70s sounding than most surviving early-70s artists these days could manage.  Then a few tracks into the disc, we come face to face with a thing we know intimately: an Adult Contemporary-format obvious single.  Make no mistake about it.  If "Go, Maria" could get the necessary promotion and distribution, it would be  -  or at least should be  -  all over AC radio and probably Triple-A radio, too, coast to coast.  "Go, Maria" is the work of a pop-oriented singer-songwriter who is conversant in Revolver-era Beatles.  King speaks of idolizing Paul McCartney, but a line in "Go, Maria" reflects a John Lennon moment.

Most of the discs we receive are hot with main action, to one degree or another, through the first few tracks; and then they run out of steam well before closing.  But even way off at the end of King's new CD is to be found one of his best songs, the bluesy/jazzy "You Stole My Heart."  This song  -  distinct from Kings several musical and interview references to The Beatles  -  has a passage which calls to mind a personal all-time favorite oldie, Sam Cooke's "Bring It on Home to Me."

So, Scott King is an easy guy to figure, right?

As it turns out, King's background in music is more than a little different from what a listener might imagine when hearing his diverse, catchy new album, In Your Head, and knowing nothing more.  So I asked him for the story of his days, in the late 1990s, of playing a noise-rocking Boston venue, Bill's Bar.

"You're absolutely right about the discrepancy between the sound of the songs on In Your Head and the type of music one would expect to hear in Bill's Bar, at least back when I was playing there in the second half of the 90s," allowed King.  "Had you been in our practice room whenever I would bring a new song to the rest of the guys in Xguru and play it for them live on acoustic guitar or piano, I suspect that you wouldn't have noticed an enormous difference, musically-speaking, between what I was presenting to them and what you can hear on In Your Head or Portrait (2005).  In fact, 'Something New' would have been a good song for Xguru, but it would have been recorded differently.  The acoustic would have been buried in the mix and the electric brought way up and about six more heavy electric guitar tracks added.

"The songs I was writing then are not as strong lyrically as what's on the new record or the previous one for that matter, but I think I was nearly as strong a crafter of the musical side of songs.  What happened was that the band would immediately reject anything with Folk, Blues, Jazz, or even Classic Rock influence.  If it didn't seem to be a cousin of Live, Lit, Eve 6, Stabbing Westward, or at least U2 ('Achtung Baby' forward), The Samples, Toad The Wet Sprocket, etc., it got the big boot (with the exception of 'Mystery' which the executive producer strong-armed the rest of the band into including on the record).  It was about having 'a sound'  -  one sound  -  and it was big power chords with little to no tolerance for conventional solos, and that's what was mostly happening in Modern Rock at that time.

"Tim O'Heir was a big part of the evolution of my songs on record and on stage.  He already had a big resume for that (Juliana Hatfield, Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, Folk Implosion, etc.) and great confidence and a clear vision for what he was going to do with our material.  He just took over at Fort Apache and had us layer a gazillion distorted guitars over everything."

"My acoustic would sometimes start a song," he continued, "but it would quickly become a minor player, part of the underlying texture as opposed to the featured instrument that it was when I would bring the raw song to the group.  It was cool though.   A great experience.  Tim helped us define a sound that put us squarely in the Modern Rock format, and it was satisfying at the time.

"I'll never forget the sold-out CD release at Bill's, or the many gigs upstairs and downstairs at The Middle East, etc.  At the same time, [since then] it has been very gratifying to have a hand in the production of my songs and to hear them on record closer to how they are in my mind.  I've sort of become what I would have been had Xguru been the Scott King Band instead.

"I don't naturally rock out all that hard I guess, and I have many influences and like a variety of styles.  So now I've kind of come into my own.  I've figured out who I am and I'm getting to be that artist I always wanted to be: a musician who just writes in whatever style he feels like and puts it all together without someone saying, 'Hey man, you can't do that; you have to have a sound.'  I'm probably less marketable because of it, I guess, but I don't know why, because I think it's a strength to have more than one dimension musically, and lyrically, too, for that matter.  The music of The Beatles certainly confirms that, don't you think?  They were stylistically all over the board, and I think that shows their versatility and contributes to why those records are so fun to listen to.  You don't get bored."

That, interestingly enough, is most (but not quite all) of one answer to a single question.  Clearly Scott King has given a good deal of thought to his music and career, and he has a solid sense about how he wants to put those ideas into words.  Notice his comment about getting to be "a musician who just writes in whatever style he feels like."  Here and there, in interviews with musicians, I paraphrase a thought from singer-songwriter Amy Fairchild along very similar lines.  And it has been my experience that being able to draw from widely-varied directions is really important to a whole lot of artists, though many find themselves in situations that hardly could be said to encourage diversity and versatility.

"I never played as part of the [WBCN Rock 'n' Roll] Rumble," said King, "but Xguru did do a few things with WBCN.   I remember one gig that Juanita the Scene Queen attended.   I recall some problem with my gear and hating my guitar sound that night and thinking we sucked.  Next thing I know my manager is telling us that Juanita has invited us to do a little tour of venues in the city, riding in the 'BCN van with the station's Hummer cruising alongside, and we're hitting all these different spots for Cinco de Mayo and playing a bunch of gigs for our favorite Boston station.  We also teamed up with 'BCN for some college gigs. . . . [W]e hit MIT and Northeastern and a few others for a series of outdoor shows."

For all his songwriting, past and present, the featured song on In Your Head, Scott King's latest album, was written by Dave Carter.

"At some point while listening to 'Frank to Valentino,' I just started hearing it with a full band, and the version you hear on In Your Head is exactly as I heard it in my head.  It's pretty much that simple.  Dave made it easy for me by recording the song with just his voice and guitar.   I had somewhere to go with it."

Speaking of Carter, in reference to the "whole canon of great American poets," King said, "[W]hat if Robert Frost had also played a mean guitar and written beautiful melodies for those words and had a gorgeous voice?"

King actually seldom interprets the work of other writers.   "I have performed one other cover, Larry Norman's 'The Outlaw,' and it's on Wrecking Ball (2007). . . . "

If there could be a perfect double bill including Scott King, what would the other act be?   King puzzled a bit, from different points of view, over what would make a perfect double bill; and he recalled some split shows involving his 90s band, Xguru.  He wound up answering, "From my perspective as a musician . . . the perfect double bill would be with my idol, Paul McCartney, but I'm not sure his fans would be happy about that!?"

Reponding to a standard question about surprising happenings in a career, King said, "I just think generally about the mystery of songwriting, which continues to surprise me."  He next explained, "I tend to be bone dry and then one day I pick up my guitar and the songs start coming on like gangbusters; but regardless of the chosen method, there's a mystery to it.  Where do melodies come from?   In Paul McCartney's case, for example, he woke up and there was 'Yesterday,' a melody so beautiful it'll make you cry.  And Dave Carter dreamed entire songs."

Taking it, for a moment, in a different direction, King said, "The un-mysterious part is that in this process I may have to work a while to get the right progression of chords for that bridge I know the song needs, or I might grab a rhyming dictionary or research something online to finish the lyrics, but the song is there; it was waiting for me.  That's the mystery in all its spiritual beauty, and it surprises and delights and unsettles me every time."

Asked about a "free, breezy feel" to much of his latest music, King said he thinks it is "an apt description of this collection of songs and how they've been recorded.  One reviewer from Northeast in Tune magazine published a similar observation about my last record.  She wrote that 'Every song feels comfortable, as if King breathes air in and music out.'   I think that observation applies to In Your Head as well.  [With the album, In Your Head, in mind, I had said, in an interview question, that it sounded to me as though King was 'singing in a style that seems to come quite naturally  -  a good fit.']

"As for whether or not this represents a stylistic departure, I'd say that immediately post-Xguru it would have, but not now.  This is kind of the trajectory that I've been on through the last two records, but I expect to be redefining myself somewhat on the next one.  I've got some exciting ideas percolating."

One thing that was percolating on the new disc, In Your Head, is the drumming of Ginger Cote.  Many of our readers know her from her times with a great Maine band, The Coming Grass.  On In Your Head, she contributes slight degrees of roughness and eccentricity in ways that add positively to the character of the recording.  Call it nuance or texture if you prefer.  Character seems right to me.  Among the records I have heard, her latest studio efforts, including In Your Head, have been her best.

"I'm solo on almost every leg of this summer tour," said King.  "I'll be playing a lot of the songs off In Your Head, because that's the disc that just came out and that I'm on the road to promote and hopefully sell, but I have also been writing a lot lately, and whenever I have new songs, I'm chomping at the bit to play them in concert.   I find this to be at once a necessary and deeply enjoyable process of working the kinks out, seeing how the audience responds, and determining which songs are the most vibrant and deserving to be on the next record."

Scott King's July and August concert schedule is heavy on Maine bookings, but the run of shows noted below includes an appearance at the Common Ground Coffeehouse in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.  He also already has a gig set for way off in early 2008 at Lowell, Mass.

For a personal view of the road from Bill's Bar to Old Orchard Beach, a Scott King show is the place to be.

• Who:   Scott King
• Where and When   Lakeshore Cafe, Livermore, ME, July 12; Hooligans, Old Orchard Beach, ME, July 13; and Common Ground Coffeehouse, Fitchburg, MA, July 14
• For more information:   www.olsenrecords.com/scottking/