One day, Piper McKinnon decided life was too short. So, she packed everything she owned into her car, and left Victoria, 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 rural Manitoba!”
After performing her own material at local clubs, she finally made it to the East Coast. Not Halifax, though – New York, where she has been working on her second album.
McKinnon recently returned from a second recording session in New York where she began paring down the songs destined for “Beautiful Disaster”, her second international release, due out in the Spring of 2010
McKinnon has been compared to Tori Amos, Kate Bush, Jewel, and Jeff Buckley. These are not bad comparisons. Notwithstanding, McKinnon’s music also reveals a dark 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, something cool and bluesy, like Ain’t It Funny, or something exquisitely melancholy and pretty, 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 out there,” she says, with a wave. “I am just a conduit.”
While her earlier music was confessional and personal, lately she draws her inspiration from books she reads, like The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jesus Papers. Not that she’s religious, in particular. She just wants to understand why things like September 11 and the London subway bombing happen. “There’s a lot about the world that I think has been happening right under my nose,” she says
The daughter of a Canadian Navy petty officer, McKinnon moved around a lot when she was younger, and has lived has lived on both coasts, but grew up mainly in Victoria. In her teens, some friends dared her to get up and sing a song at a blues jam in Victoria, “Love Me Like a Man” by Bonnie Raitt. They had no idea what they were starting. The crowd demanded an encore. But the seed was planted.
And so the journey continues
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