One day Piper McKinnon decided life was too short. So, she packed everything she owned into her car, left “The Island”, and headed for the East Coast. “I was on my way to Halifax, actually”, says the sprite, captivating red head. “The car had other ideas. The transmission exploded and Vancouver’s as far as I got. I fixed the car, got a place, stuck around. Thankfully it didn’t happen somewhere in Manitoba!” she says chuckling.
The daughter of a Canadian Navy petty officer, McKinnon moved around a lot when she was younger, living on both coasts before settling permanently with her family in Victoria BC. In her teens, some friends dared her to get up and sing a song at a blues jam in the city, “Love Me Like a Man” by Bonnie Raitt. They had no idea what they were starting. The crowd demanded an encore. The seed was planted.
After performing her own material at local clubs and bars throughout the Lower Mainland, she finally made it to the East Coast. Not Halifax, though – New York, where she has been working on her second album.
McKinnon’s songwriting and stirring vocal touches have been compared to Tori Amos, Kate Bush, Jewel, and Jeff Buckley. Marvelous comparisons indeed! But notwithstanding, McKinnon’s music also reveals a darker side. If McKinnon’s muse were to assume physical form, it might look like one of Lucifer’s fallen angels: beautiful, brooding, scorched by the flames of an epic battle. In one of its better moods, her muse might inspire her to write something whimsical and funky, like an ode to “Robert Palmer”, or something filled with exquisite and beautiful melancholy, like “You Were the Man”. On a bad day, it might wake her up in the middle of the night to write a song like “Demon”, the sum of all her fears: losing her hands, losing her voice, losing herself. “That was a really bad dream,” McKinnon says. Once, she even woke up to find the lyrics to a song, the “Stones of Bayon”, written beside her bed. “I think those songs are all sort of floating out there,” she says, with a wave. “I am just a conduit.”
While ”Letterbox” was more confessional and personal in tone, the lyrics on “Beautiful Disaster” are a testament to the many history and anthropology books McKinnon has read recently, such as “The Dead Sea Scrolls” and the “Jesus Papers”. Not that McKinnon is religious, in particular. She just wants to understand why things like September 11 and the London Subway Bombing happen. So do we all ……
Life’s great questions continue to puzzle and confound, but with her forthcoming release “Beautiful Disaster”, Piper McKinnon reminds us of our need to seek a common truth, all the while touching us with an intricate musical work that reveals how the complex, the misguided, and the beautiful can all meet under one roof. Bravo.
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