Along the bottom of the CD jacket of Bourbon County, the debut solo album from Tara Key - lauded guitarist for the veteran indie-rock outfits Babylon Dance Band and Antietam - runs the endorsement "Tara Key plays Williams and Bally machines." And it's true: While Key may choose to strangle her rhythmic squalls out of the necks of Les Pauls, she credits pinball as her album's true inspiration. Bourbon County was, in fact, born with her hands at the flippers. "It was an entirely unpremeditated thing," Key says. "Actually, it was kind of a joke."
Nevertheless, Bourbon County became a serious venture, written for most part while Key was seperated for several months last year from her husband, band mate and Bourbon producer Tim Harris. The album's meditative confessions and lyrical instrumentals document a journey of self-discovery. "It was a really enriching time in a weird way," Key says, "because I was forced into thinking about extremes and limits. It's adulthood, you know. It's tough."
Bourbon took shape on a pub crawl through Manhattan's Lower East Side - "Three-quarters of the songs were written at one table at Burp Castle," she says, referring to a local bar where the help dress as monks - and came together during a two-week stay in northern Vermont, where she recorded five songs in a rural eight-track studio. Key describes her north-woods sojourn - which inspired songs like "Long Trail" and "Northern Star" - in almost mystical terms. "It was a revelation, having come from Kentucky and thinking the only place possible that I could live a happy life was New York," she says. "I got up to Vermont and I heard a similar density of sound, but they're different sounds. They're easier on the ear." Key gathered a group of friends with whom she jammed into the night in discordant harmony with the surrounding nature. "It was like a perfect summer camp," she recalls.
The collaborative spirit spilled over to the New York sessions last fall, where guest artists included such Key friends as members of Eleventh Dream Day, the Shams and Yo La Tengo.
The resulting music is more laid-back than the powerful pop that Key first forged in Louisville, Ky., with the Babylon Dance Band or the fierce mood studies she developed more recently in New York with Antietam. (The Babylons have a posthumous album, Four on One, coming out this spring, and Antietam have recorded some tracks for their sixth album.) Most of the songs are acoustic based and on "Northern Star" and "One Spark" (written with the Shams' Sue Garner) Key got to indulge her melodic side. "Pop, in my own twisted way, is at the soul of everything I do," she says. "This record was a chance to take that a little farther." Still, her much-admired textural fretwork is Bourbon County's calling card. "The first person that showed me how a guitar could speak was Neil Young," Key says, "It made me want to live my whole life teetering on the edge of feedback."
Copyright © Evelyn McDonnell 1994
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