Priscilla Ahn
On June 29th 2009 Blue Note will be releasing an album from singer-songwriter Priscilla Ahn.
Priscilla embarked upon a career the old-fashioned way: she packed her belongings in a car—“two guitars, clothes, and some other junk I really didn't need to bring”—and left her Pennsylvania home for L.A. That she found steady gigs—a supportive circle of fellow artists and a record deal in a relatively short period of time, give or take several months of bad waitressing jobs—will come as no surprise after a single listen to “Dream,” the lilting opening track of A Good Day, her full-length debut. Ahn artfully balances youthful whimsy with grown-up sophistication, and a dollop of humour for good measure.
Priscilla recently played a small UK tour as well as appearing on Later With Jools Holland after which the track “Dream” went to #24 in the Amazon UK music chart, #4 in the singer/songwriters chart and #1 in the contemporary folk chart She comes back to the UK to play at the T in the Park, Glastonbury and Hyde Park Calling festivals.
Produced by Joey Waronker’s the album is elegantly economical. He keeps Ahn’s pristine voice front and center, surrounding her with subtle, beautiful sounds from a range of unusual instruments. A Good Day is grounded in folk, country and pop and Ahn ingeniously transforms Willie Nelson’s breakup ballad, “Opportunity To Cry” into an upbeat shuffle, while maintaining all its pathos. Though Ahn presents a dreamy, sunny facade in her lyrics, her songs display a serious emotional depth and an almost preternatural maturity.
While her peers angle to be MySpace superstars or laptop geniuses, Ahn is impressively old-school. She picked up the guitar at age 14, urged to do so by her classic rock-loving dad, and by the time she was 16, she was looking for the nearest open-mic night, which happened to be at a local Borders Book Store. Getting a driver’s license the following year meant she could do even more gigs 90 minutes away in Philadelphia. Meeting up with fellow Blue Note artist Amos Lee and his producer Barrie Maquire was to change her life when Maguire asked her to join him on a cross country drive to LA.
“It was my first time in L.A. and I loved it right away. It seemed so right for my personality and my temperament. My mom had distant Korean cousins and I moved in with them for the first month.” She became a sort of vagabond artist, living in several different temporary apartments. But she never lost focus on her goal: “I played all the open-mics I could play. I would go to one almost every day. “
An exhausting year of waitressing, however, almost killed her dream. “My songs were coming out jaded and cynical,” she admits, though not a trace of that remains on A Good Day.
In 2006 she released a self-titled EP recorded in Joe Waronker’s (Beck, Nelly Furtado, Rickie Lee Jones) studio of which two tracks, “Dream” and “I Don’t Think So,” were revamped for A Good Day.
Serendipity was again on Ahn’s side: “I heard through the grapevine that Amos was always telling people at Blue Note to keep tabs on me. Amos’s A&R guy came out to see me and then I agreed to do a showcase for the company. I often said if I were to choose any record label it would be Blue Note because I thought they would get me. So I was very happy when it really happened.”
For A Good Day, Ahn reunited with Waronker, and along with multi-instrumentalist Gus Seyffert—who co-wrote “Astronaut” with Ahn—the trio basically recorded the tunes live. “Gus would play bass or guitar, I would play my guitar and sing, Joey would play drums,” explains Ahn. “Once we laid that base down we would overdub quirky things. Other guests making their own memorable contributions were keyboardists Greg Kurstin (the bird and the bee, Lily Allen), Keefus Ciancia (Fiona Apple, Cassandra Wilson, T Bone Burnett) and Zac Rae (Fiona Apple, Macy Gray), guitarist/film composer Mike Andrews (Me and You and Everyone We Know); musical saw player Ursula Knudsun; cellist/string arranger Oliver Kraus (Joshua Radin, Beth Orton, Liz Phair); and celebrated jazz keyboardist Larry Goldings. Veteran R&B session singers Jim Gilstrap and Orin Waters lend their voices to “Leave The Light On,” a gentle, folk-gospel sing-along. Ahn herself plays a wide range of instruments including guitar, ukulele, piano, harpsichord, harmonica, and autoharp, and of course, the kazoo!
When Ahn impetuously hit the road a few years back, she may not have known exactly where she was going, but A Good Day proves she’s always been headed in the right direction.