"I'd like to be in love, never to refuse
Buddha in my belly or Vishnu in my shoes.
For once I'd pour my heart
Out on to the table,
Put in a wick and light it like a candle..."
--Vicky Pratt Keating

Vicky Pratt Keating is a jumble of nerves, or, as she describes it, "pre-Columbian." Juan Valdez would not be pleased. Her phone call comes half an hour past its appointed time, and she apologizes profusely. Admitting she's fairly fried from exhaustion, Vicky says she was up until the wee hours chatting with a dear friend who dropped by. And, she adds, she feels a bit guilty because she knew she had an interview the next day, and she knew she needed her beauty sleep. But she really wanted to talk with her friend...

Seems to me her priorities were in the right place. As a matter of fact, Vicky Pratt Keating's notions of the really important things appear to be right on target. The native Washingtonian has spent the past decade working at a music career -- learning the nuts and bolts of the business end, working radio formats for the most exposure, and (her main musical priority) perfecting her craft. But her primary focus has been on her reality, on exploring the nature of life and relationships, of truth and mysticism. Even now, with her album, Blue Apples, signed by 1-800-PRIME-CD, the national record label, Keating is much more concerned with keeping her life serene and keeping her head in a good space. For this artist, music is a wondrous part of life, with "part of life" underscored. Making her life -- and the music within it -- as rewarding as possible seems her main goal. And if part of that is taking time out to put friendship before business, it sounds like an intelligent and worthy choice to me.

But business eventually beckons, and Keating is happy to talk about her signing with 1-800-PRIME-CD. The record company, she explains, is an independent firm out of New York that struck a deal to re-mix, re-package and re-release Blue Apples, an LP the artist had previously released on her own. Since the disc has never really received any major distribution or promotion, Keating reckons this deal will give Blue Apples a new life.

"It's going to be in all of the Tower Record stores, Borders, and all that," she enthuses, "and they're doing this massive radio promotion with, like, more than 600 Triple A (Adult Album Alternative) and college radio stations. It's a small label, where everybody kind of pulls together. I'm certainly not sitting with my feet up on a desk waiting for my record to take off. I've had to work with them a lot on the promotional aspects and be involved in every way. It's kind of like running my own record label."

Keating says that without a manager to handle day-to-day administrative work or to act as a liaison between her and the label, she feels it's her responsibility to be heavily involved in making her album as successful as it can be. And that's true, she insists, whether your label is a small indie or a major.

"It's either that or sleep with everybody in the record company," she laughs.

Oddly enough, the label's name helps. Not only is 1-800-PRIME-CD the name of the company, it's also the number to dial to skip the retailer and order the disc direct. The artist sees the name as a novel approach.

"It's on all the promos," she says. "When people see it's an 800 number, they'll end up calling it. At least it's not a 900 number." The company also offers its wares through a catalog, which includes performers signed to the company only for distribution purposes. (One such artist is Ani DeFranco, who is deservedly making a big name for herself in the field of womon [sic]-oriented music.)

With all of the emphasis on marketing and promotion and distribution, it's all too easy to lose sight of the music, which for Keating has always been the main thing. When her career began in the mid-'80s, business was the farthest thing from her mind.

"My goals have been forming as I've gone along," she says. "I never really went in with any clear goals other than playing music. I never had any concept of anything else."

Vicky Pratt Keating's childhood was a sad one in many ways -- she says she suffered abuse at the hands of her stepfather, and describes her younger self as a "classic straight-A geek" who had no friends. Being extremely introverted and feeling largely outcast, music became her one and only friend and savior.

"I've always loved music. It's always been this huge, important... you know, monumental thing that was always so mysterious and so healing and so divine and so..." She learned to play the guitar and loved to sing -- Keating even recalls how much she enjoyed harmonizing with her siblings at a summer camp in the Appalachian mountains.

Before too long, she discovered a magical refuge in her own private Beatlemania. "I saw A Hard Day's Night, and I was 12-years-old. I was awkward and strange -- that whole puberty thing. There were all these intense feelings rushing forth," she remembers. "Finding the Beatles was like this religious experience. It was quite profound, and it changed my life." In fact, it was the start of her spiritual awakening, she believes.

"The wild woman spirit took over in me," she relates. "I started running away from home and hitchhiking God-knows-where and ended up in a detention home." Today, Keating is philosophical about her colorful past.

"All of that stuff, everybody goes through their version of it. It helps you chisel out who you are. Being a musician, I'm thankful for everything I've been through, and I wouldn't change anything, because it's all part of the puzzle that makes me who I am. The things you deal with are the things you have to share with other people so that you -- and they -- can heal."

"Through your essence, whatever you've been through in your life comes through in whatever you do. You could stand there and not say a word, and it's going to come through," she explains. "I think part of it comes through in my music -- there's this intangible thing. I mean, it's nice and poetic and all that stuff, but the things that have happened to me are there. When I think of the music I like and I look at the artists and who they are, I feel some real intensity or peaks and dips or darkness or some wound from the music that are very dramatic. When artists have gone through things, you pick that up through their paintings or books or music without even knowing why. It's just there."

So how did Vicky move from a private love of music as a confidante and refuge to professional musician? Right after her high school graduation, she acted upon a whim.

"Veneman Music has a little rack they put out that holds classifieds. Well, I put an ad in to be a chick singer in a band. A band I'd known of -- actually, a dream band of mine, answered the ad," she recalls. The Backstreet Rhythm Band played '60s R&B and acid-rock covers along with retreads of songs by groups like the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead.

Keating says she had a blast being a member: "It was so much fun! It was the first thing I'd ever done professionally. We made money, but there were seven members, so for all intents and purposes, we never made a dime." She remembers her three years with the group as being a cool, communal type of thing.

"We had two drummers and a school bus. We just had the whole hippie kind of experience," she says. "It was really good training, because I wasn't thinking of big success or anything like that. I was just learning my chops, playing guitar and, since I was the main singer and frontperson, learning about how to project myself -- little old me -- over that band. I learned a lot of things about all aspects of gigging and sound. And then, I decided to do it solo."

Keating says she started performing on her own in an almost "unconscious" state. She played a mix of original and cover songs at bars around the Washington area, blissfully unaware of any career plan. A 1988 trip to New England opened her eyes to the possibilities.

"I had the good fortune to meet these amazing songwriters from that New England acoustic storyteller type of genre," she damn near gushes. "It was awesome, and it was also frightening. I mean, yikes! These people were great! There was this whole acoustic scene -- it was a real awakening for me. I met this guy up there and ended up doing a duo with him in Ocean City, MD. Here I was, this young thing just starting out, and he was this great musician who'd been doing it forever. We didn't even rehearse. We just played these beachy places and made a lot of money, so we did more, and then, it just started exploding."

Her self-described explosion turned into a whirlwind of activity. Keating started playing at folk-oriented coffeehouses, doing full-fledged concerts and even working as an opening act for other area artists. And she decided she would do all-original music from then on.

"That limited the places where I could play at first -- most bars are only concerned with how much beer they're going to sell. But there were places in D.C. where I played, places like Kramer Books and Afterwords Cafe in Dupont Circle and Food for Thought," she says. "Eventually, I played just about everywhere in the area, from the Bayou to the Birchmere." After a while, she briefly relocated to New England. A troubled romance brought her back to the Washington area. Later, in the early '90s, she settled in Virginia, near the quiet solitude of the Shenandoahs. For a young woman who had always lived with someone -- roommates, boyfriends, her mother or her husband (Keating was married very briefly six years ago), this new home was a milestone.

"I loved it -- it was the first time I was living alone," she says. "I had a great place and my writing was blossoming." And she kept busy -- booking herself at folk festivals and clubs near and far and driving herself to these gigs all over the country -- even as far away as Alaska.

Vicky tends to think of the entire process as evolutionary. Initially, her goal was to make her own music. The next realization was making a living by making her own music. That led to another idea. "It would really be great to make better money at this and to make a record," she recalls thinking. "'Oooh, what a concept, I could make a CD -- I've got some songs and stuff.' That's the next phase. And once you're past that, you think, 'I'd really like my CD to be played.' So, it's kind of this organic process that unfolds. I never went into it with a strategy. Maybe I'd be further along if I had."

Maybe. That is something we'll never know. But it's evident that Keating spent the time wisely, at any rate, concentrating on the quality of her very unique brand of musical communication. As good as this girl is at talking shop, business seems almost incidental once the schmooze boundary is crossed. Vicky is a true original, a spiritual human and artist, a wondering, wandering soul looking for beauty, meaning and truth.

As it has been since she was a young girl, her art continues to be her lifeline.

"If I'm going through anything, I have to write," she admitted in a record label release. "It's a way for me to transform, to make some sense out of it -- to make some poetry, some magic out of it. You have to search yourself and you have to overcome your fears and confront rejection over and over. You have to not only bare your soul, but dig down inside of it to find things to write about. It's like you're a piece of clay and this music keeps molding you and shaping you and digging stuff out of you."

In our conversation, she is quick to agree when the point is made that creating music serves as therapy for her.

"A lot of my songs are all about the soul, and being honest, and peeling back layers," she says, noting the evolution of her career as a lyricist.

"I look at the songs I wrote before Blue Apples and the ones that have come afterward. Most of them are very personal, and I can see how I've been peeling back the layers and telling the truth from my soul. Still, a lot of it seems like I was only skimming the surface. To the degree that I've been looking at issues within myself, I keep facing deeper portions of myself, which comes out in the music," she continues. "What's weird is, you'd think I'd be writing about more personal stuff, but the songs are more universal. They're just fueled by things that come from a more pure place within me."

Her record label accurately describes Keating as "a sensitive and compassionate musical chameleon," and indeed, she draws from her own experiences to merge fact and fancy to create a sonic tale with which many of us can relate. As she faces up to the deepest secrets and demons within her, she also allows us to examine ourselves as intensely. By sharing herself, she helps us to see ourselves that much more clearly. And the path of self-discovery -- for artist and audience -- continues.

"Each song is a scene, a life, and you paint different parts of it here and there. You can picture the whole thing as a time, a space, an era, a color, a smell, anything," she is quoted as saying. "I feel like I've just started scratching the surface of getting into expressing the truth of my own soul."

Musically, her sound has evolved over the years, as well, and it continues to change and grow. "Quirky" is a word many have used to describe her music and words. She herself calls her music "sci-fi folk," and incorporates a host of instruments (such as uillean pipes and bazouki) into her explorations of new lands and ideas. Ultimately, she creates a music of mind-expanding lyrics and intriguing, otherworldly sounds that tug at the heart while caressing the ears.

Her craft has served another valuable purpose. After leaving her band and hitting the solo trail, Keating found herself in virtual solitude. Once her reputation was established, she began hitting the dusty trail, playing at coffeehouses, clubs, and festivals all over the country. Now, she averages at least 60,000 miles a year. As such, the road has been her day-to-day reality, and music, yet again, her constant companion. She insists that she doesn't mind being alone ("I'm a total loner"), that the time driving between gigs gives her the chance to process, to think and to listen to music. In "Rough Draft" on Blue Apples, she even waxes philosophical about her life on the move: "I travel every chance I get (I go all the time)/I know it's a replacement for the journey inside..."

As she's monitored her internal journey, her trek through this great land has increased directly as a result of the growth in her career. Over the past couple of years, Keating has been pursued by a number of record companies that have been eager to get a closer look at the unique talent that is hers. Realizing that a record deal would be a positive for her life and career, she obliged by hitting the road. Again.

"I've been through this flurry of showcasing at big conventions like South by Southwest and CMJ and the Nashville Extravaganza. I was flown to L.A., and this one record company gave me a deal," she remembers. "I turned that down and then was actually signed to this other deal for a label under Giant Records. I thought I had made it. It ended up that the company held my career for three months. We had this option agreement where I couldn't showcase for anybody else. And then, the label never happened -- the partnership behind the label split up."

The unfortunate situation wasn't a total loss -- Keating says she remains on excellent terms with everyone involved in the aborted deal.

She wound up recording and releasing a CD on her own in 1993. The album was recorded at the home studio of local audio whiz Bob Read, who shared production duties with Keating. A number of prime players, including guitarist Pete Kennedy and violinist Rick Schmidt, were enlisted to share their talents. The result was Blue Apples, which, in local release, won Keating loads of industry praise and comparisons with Kate Bush and Nanci Griffith. On the strengths of the disc, the artist won two Washington Area Music Association awards. And the LP served as an excellent tool for shopping record companies. Within a little more than a year, Vicky had a deal with 1-800-PRIME-CD.

Right now, she's happy with the folks at her record label, but Keating has her eye on the future. Her deal is only for this album.

"When I record my music, I tend to like lush production -- that tends to be expensive. When I did Blue Apples, it cost me $23,000, and I was working within a budget," she says. "Next time, I think I'd like to be involved with a company that has more money for recording and promotion. It's just easier -- it allows you to do more than you have the ability to do." She hasn't nixed the idea of working with PRIME-CD again, but she's keeping her options open.

"I know so much about the business, and I could practically, with an investor, start up my own label, do it on my own, and actually make some money," she says, fully admitting the fact that she is ambitious. "Look at Ani DeFranco. She's making money hand over fist. Why would she want to sign with anyone? It's just a matter of knowing how to do it, hiring the people and having the capital. You can put in there that I'm looking for $100,000." And she giggles mischieviously.

Actually, she is staring to delegate duties more. The original Ms. Do-It-Yourself plans to hire an assistant. And of late, she's been touring in a trio format with Greg Howard, who plays Chapman Stick (a melodic ten-stringed instrument that can sound like a guitar, bass, and keyboard all at once, or, in her words, "like a million Michael Hedgeses"), and percussionist Parker Daggett.

"One of my favorite bands is Rush. I love 'em," she says, "and we're kinda like them -- a power trio. I've always played solo, so I know how to fill out a lot of space. My guitar playing has a lot of lead and bass stuff going on and middle Eastern riffs and whatever. And then, you have this drummer, who's kind of like Neil Peart, and Greg, who has this very syntho-techie bass guitar thing happening. There's a lot of sound that comes out of the three of us. If you closed your eyes, it would sound as if there were five people, easy."

She plans to go on the road to the Southwest and West Coast with Howard and Daggett in June. Until then, she plans to focus on touring and radio promotions to pump Blue Apples. In the not-too-distant-future, she plans to get back into the studio to record a new LP. For Vicky Pratt Keating, in the words of Bob Marley, "every day is work."

She seems generally happy with her life and its neverending pace. Although she's not in a relationship and appears to be avoiding one (refusing Vishnu in her shoes?), Keating keeps moving on the road -- it seems to be her natural state -- and finds peace at home, "an incredible place on 120 acres" in the shadow of the majestic mountains Shenandoah. And she continues, as always, to take stock, to take a look around and within, to learn.

"As I move to different levels, I've got to keep it all in perspective to make sure I'm making progress. I think of everything I've experienced, and the spiritual growth that's happened whether I wanted it to or not. And all in all, it pleases me, because I'm continuing to learn. Whatever happens, that won't change."