Doug Keith

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“I love songs and I love lyrics,” Doug Keith states.  “I don’t believe in throwaway songs, and I don’t believe that the single is the future.  I love albums, and I love it when an artist or band thinks of an album as the thing itself, not just the vehicle for one or two songs.”

The New York singer/songwriter/guitarist more than lives up to those principles on The Lucky Ones, his second album under his own name.  The 11-song collection, on his co-owned independent The Village Label, demonstrates Keith’s uncanny knack for capturing vividly intimate emotional truths in song.

Keith weaves those truths into understatedly eloquent songs, which he delivers with a weathered, expressive voice, nimble, blues-rooted guitar work and organically layered arrangements that effortlessly convey the emotional immediacy of his compositions.  The material on The Lucky Ones ranges from the acoustic starkness of “We Left Everything” to the surging electricity of “The Lucky Ones” to the buoyant textures of “Skip James Radio”; the common threads are the warmth and insight that the artist brings to every track.

Keith has already won international notice for his first official solo effort, Here’s to Outliving Me, which led NPR’s Rachel Kowal to describe him as a “a well-weathered and sage source of advice and storytelling.”  Purge observed that Keith “conjures the spirit of Dylan, Young, and Waits.”  Europe’s Rootstime stated, “We will watch Doug Keith and his future work very closely because he will be huge.”

“I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with the guitar,” Keith states.  Growing up outside Minneapolis, Minnesota and Syracuse, New York, he was drawn to music early in life.  He began playing guitar at the age of 10, developing his chops by having his guitar teacher show him how to play his favorite Replacements, Husker Du and Camper Van Beethoven songs.  His teacher further stoked Keith’s musical passion by introducing him to the work of Jimi Hendrix.  He began writing songs and formed his first band while in high school, playing chaotic sets in local venues.

Keith’s instrumental and aesthetic horizons expanded considerably with his discovery of the acoustic blues of Elizabeth Cotten and Robert Johnson, the rural bluegrass of Doc Watson and the eccentric Americana of John Fahey.  Those visionary pickers exercised a massive influence on Keith’s guitar playing and songwriting.

After moving to San Francisco, Keith spent three years playing bass with the punk trio The Gods Hate Kansas, with whom he gained some crucial touring and record experience.  When that band broke up, Keith began taking his first steps towards recording and performing his own compositions.  Relocating to New York City, Keith played with several bands, including the noted noise-rock combo Up the Empire, while continuing to work on his own material.  Using the nom de disc The First Person to See an Elephant, Keith released two experimentally oriented albums, a four-song EP and half of a split 7″ single.

After Up the Empire disbanded, Keith decided to focus upon making more straightforward, song-oriented recordings under his own name.  The first result was Here’s to Outliving Me, which showcased Keith’s songs in spare, largely acoustic settings.

“I hadn’t recorded anything but loud punk stuff for so long, so it was interesting to just let the acoustic guitars be,” Keith explains.  “Trying to do something totally different than what I’d done before really freed me to just do whatever sounded right.  I came away from the experience with a new level of excitement about playing the songs I’d written.”

Keith’s creative evolution continues on The Lucky Ones.  Recorded at The Fort Brooklyn with engineer Jim Bentley and a cast of talented friends including Kendall Meade of Mascott and Courtney Kaiser of Kaiser Cartel, the album shows off the artist’s increasing fluency and confidence, as well as his increasing mastery of the recording medium.

“With Here’s to Outliving Me, I still wasn’t too familiar with how to get what I wanted out of a studio experience,” Keith admits.  “But by the time I made The Lucky Ones, I had been playing under my own name with a full band for a year, and we’d played nearly every song on the record live many times.  I wanted to do it as live as possible, so we tracked most of the instruments live, with everyone in one room, and most of the vocals were first takes.

“I wrote most of these songs on acoustic guitar and then worked them out from there,” he continues.  “I was going for an intimate feel.  I love the feel of the records people who were big in the ’60s were making in the early ’70s—Bob Dylan, Neil Young, the Beatles’ solo stuff, where you can hear breaths and string scratches and the occasional bum note, so I tended to lean in that direction.  This is also the first I’ve written a bunch of songs thinking about how they could be played as a band.  Writing from that perspective definitely opened up some new options for me.”

Like Here’s to Outliving Me, The Lucky Ones is on The Village Label, which Keith (in partnership with longtime friend Chandra Johnson) recently launched as an outlet for his own work, as well as that of other emerging artists.  “We have good distribution and a pretty cool vision of where we want to take it,” Keith asserts, adding, “At this point, it’s the best of all worlds.  It’s a lot of extra work, but it’s also very liberating.  As an artist, I can do what I want to do when I want to do it, and I can release records whenever I want.”

Press Quotes:

“I don’t know much about Doug Keith other than that his CD The Lucky Ones is one of my favorite albums of the year so far.”
- Joe Heim / The Washington Post

“Here’s To Outliving Me, is familiar but fresh. The New York native’s songs are rooted comfortably in traditional folk and Americana, without being mawkish or treading into tired territory. This is largely because Keith’s voice is so richly textured, backed by sweet harmonies and beautifully layered instrumentation. Keith is a modern-day troubadour. He sings of the usual topics: women, heartbreak, death, and longing. But thanks to a welcome trace of roughness in his voice, he comes off as a well-weathered and sage source of advice and storytelling.”
- Rachel Kowal / NPR

“Working with a poppier version of a singer-songwriter or even Americana feel, Doug Keith shows the strength of mature lyrics [on his second album The Lucky Ones]. Keith has gotten right by staying even-keeled, and the smart lyrics and steady music combine for a surprisingly good listen.”
- Popmatters

“Doug Keith’s second solo album, The Lucky Ones, is a just about perfect piece of work. One flawless, lovely, moving song after another for forty minutes and not a mistake, not a naff moment, not a second that isn’t unarelled in it’s beauty, it’s intensity, the song for the words, the words for the song, the arrangement, from back ground to front, from violins to acoustic guitar.”
- Rock NYC (link: http://bit.ly/9TwULg)

“A soulful collection of self penned songs fill this album with a hazy vibe of good times and melancholy. Doug Keith obviously has a way with a tune and an ear for a ramshackle chorus. There are moments of great beauty ‘There Are Days’ boasts a lyrical almost gossamer guitar solo that precedes a stirring mixed voice chorus that just hits the spot. You know… that spot……the one where Neil sings the chorus to Old Man and the others join in……..that spot. This is a great album. Buy it and cherish it. Then play it to someone else.”
- Americana UK (9 out of 10)

“A fantastic solo debut from this New York singer-songwriter who conjures the spirit of Dylan, Young, and Waits–the former, for example, at the height of his sneering Hawks-backed era on “Salty Woman.” “Take the Hammer Down, Dear” shares the earthiness of Richard Buckner’s finest work. The songs are almost uniformly beautiful and heartrending, with backing tracks whose crisp acoustics, tinkling pianos, piercing organ, and percussive heartbeat channel the finest work of the icons Keith convincingly recalls.”
- PURGe (#3 in 2008’s Top 20, 2008)

“…from the first notes of “The Companion of an Angel” from his upcoming release “Here’s To Outliving Me” I was hooked. As a nice bonus Jennifer O’Connor is featured on a number of tracks including “Companion…” Its theme of an undying love for an angel-like woman is one I can relate to.”
– songs: Illinois

“Doug Keith’s lyrics create imagery like the classic country/folk storytellers and there’s a lot of delicate interplay between Doug’s vocals, his guitar work and the work of his band mates.”
- Brooklyn Rocks

“Eleven endearing indie pop songs… Ear pleasing melodies, warm acoustics and occasional moments of shoegazing simplicity.”
– Hear/Say magazine

“We will watch Doug Keith and his future work very closely because he will be  huge.”
- Rootstime (Belgium)