A Better Candidate for Sainthood

I continue in my tradition of presenting to you as some kind of revelation, dear reader, a phenomenon whose flash in the pan was heralded, and its passing mourned, by the rest of civilization while I, apparently, wasn't paying the least attention. But even if I show up late, I still try to make an appearance.

Today's subject: K T Tunstall.



I've been intrigued by "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" for at least a couple of months--I may even have inadvertently seen the video in some airport lounge or other--and now I heard another song on the radio, "Suddenly I See," and decided I ought to blow the ten bucks at iTunes and see what the rest of the album is like.

I love a troubadour, a singer with their solo instrument at the microphone (even better when they're accompanying themselves). I love the nakedness, the fearless exposure of one's art with no wall of amplifiers or processors to hide behind. It's a great acid test of artistic confidence. Some of Sinatra's best stuff is just him and Bill Miller at the piano, and Elton is never better than in Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters. This is not exactly the character of Tunstall's album--or not the whole thing, anyway--but there's enough of this essence to put her star on my map. She doesn't blaze any new trails genre-wise, but she does the established forms with an engaging directness and notable sonic honesty. (The antithesis to this artistic philosophy to me--not that there's only a single way to excel artistically--is someone like Madonna, who neither plays nor writes, and whose talents, in my opinion, would be unknown without studio magic and big label collaboration.)

Well, the download from iTunes includes a bonus track, a video of Ms. Tunstall performing on some network television variety show (or whatever), and now I'm really hooked. And not just because she's doing some modern version of the one-man German oom-pah band where the guy walks around in circles and the motion of his limbs activates a variety of instruments (the best of which sound like a New York hot dog vendor falling down a flight of subway stairs). But her use of this sound-looping pedal so that she can accompany herself is deft and fun to watch. She plays her guitar very well, and she has a voice to make you back up and listen to passages a couple times over. One toe dipped in the Cowboy Junkies, maybe, with the occasional flash of Janis Joplin.

But far better yet is her transformation while she performs. I used to marvel at Stevie Ray Vaughan because he played like he was possessed, or maybe like he was in a drug trance (which, as it happens, he was in the early days). While his bandmates produced pleasant sounds through their workman-like motions, Stevie seemed to pour himself out as he played and sang. High or sober, he sweated profusely while he toiled, while the others seemed collected and relatively untaxed. He appeared to devote not one whit of consciousness to the impossible guitar playing and blues wail, but seemed rather as though he were being manipulated by some foreign entity, something using his facilities like a marionette for its own ends. It was incontestably sincere, and you could see that the act of performing took a chunk of some core thing out of him.

K T Tunstall is perhaps not quite so dramatically transformed, but it's the same thing; it's fun to see her, cute and a bit pixieish with a crooked smile and a slightly ingratiating-to-the-big-TV-man manner, become absolute master of this little four minute universe. She makes a few preparatory stomps on her pedals and quickly checks her guitar tuning, and then steps into the phone booth, as it were, and emerges as a star.

It just doesn't get sexier than that.