Kirsten Haze has been one half of The Haze and Dacey Collective with John Dacey and supporting musicians. She also plays solo gigs, which is what you are seeing in this instalment of AUK’s Mini-Gig series. She is more than capable of entertaining an audience on her own, playing this gig on a Kawai ES6 electric piano. “They don’t make this model anymore,” she offered. “I bought it new in 2009 to reward myself for finally finishing my PhD. I ride this thing hard — you can see the scuffs in the video. It has been broken three times on tour, fixed up and put back on the circuit. It’s got 88 keys, weighted and touch-sensitive, and I love how it plays and sounds. It’s also really freakin’ heavy!”
The indie acoustic duo’s last album was titled “Letters from Gilead” (2021), which will be a familiar name to any of you who, like Kirsten, watched the excellent TV series, “The Handmaid’s Tale” or read Margaret Atwood’s novel. The album featured the full range of their repertoire from roots rock to alt country, indie folk, gospel and “speakeasy swing.” Its common thread is pulling stories of people hanging on to love, hope, courage, and humanity, while trying to survive the dystopian nightmare that is Gilead.
Haze has been living in Richmond, Virginia since 2006. She was born in Connecticut but moved to Vienna, Austria around age 7 when her mother married an Austrian and remained there until returning to the U.S. for college. She recalls playing in public for the first time. “I performed publicly as a choir member as early as 4th grade (in Austria). In terms of playing out live as a folk singer, I started at open mics in Athens, Georgia in the early 2000s, which was when I joined my first band and got paid (minimally).”
With a voice sometimes silken and sometimes sassy, Haze sings about stories of good intentions, messy entanglements, and ditched resolutions. Her topics are as broad as the styles of music she calls upon, touching on guilt and forgiveness, of sweet-talking boys and tortured, troubled men, or beautiful broken women and the girls they once were.
Haze recorded this mini-gig from her living room simply, using just her Google Pixel Pro 6 cell phone. But the four-song set she plays is anything but simple. The first three songs are off the “Letters from Gilead” album, for which you can find lyrics here. The final song is a Howard Jones cover called “Hide and Seek”, where the 80s New Wave artist goes back to the Big Bang and asks us to remember a time when there was, “nothing at all, just a distant hum.”
Kirsten Haze provides her own insight below into the songs she plays on her mini-gig. Sit back and enjoy the show. She has an smooth and easy rapport with her audience, which made her a great fit for a mini-gig.
- Jezebel’s – The setting for this song is a sleazy speakeasy in the Republic of Gilead, and it is sung from the perspective of June’s best friend, Moira, who’s telling her about what it’s like to work there. This is the 4th track on the album, and was originally released as a single. I later released a live duo version as well. Incidentally, this is the very first song I ever composed on the piano instead of the guitar.
- Closet Scrawl – This is the 3rd track on the album, and the darkest. Trigger warning: it references a suicide. The last time I played it live in front of people was this past summer at a songwriter round-up in Ontario, at a cool little place in Stratford called The Bunker. I very rarely play this out live because some of the imagery is rather jarring and upsetting, and because I keep yell-singing the word “bastards” over and over. But I hope you also hear a sense of hope, resilience, and the will to survive through the worst of times and circumstances.
- Hannah – The 8th track on the album, this one is the most sparsely arranged, with the only instrumentation being a single vocal, piano, and mandolin. It’s a melancholy lullaby inspired by the heart-breaking scene in which June is able to reunite with her young daughter for just a few minutes before saying goodbye.
- Hide and Seek (cover, Howard Jones) – Right after the presidential election results came in this November, I was filled with despair, and was feeling the need to tap into the mystical and the spiritual. I hadn’t listened to this song in decades, but somehow it just popped into my head out of nowhere. I started searching for it on YouTube and found several versions to work from. Howard Jones released this song in the 1980s, and back then it was driven by ethereal synths, but you can find live versions where he plays it on an acoustic piano. The lyrics can be seen here if you scroll down to page 34 which is the 27th page of the PDF.
