With her stunning debut album, Blue Apples, Vicky Pratt Keating proves herself a unique blend of originality, whimsy and soul, capable of unabashed talent for arranging and composing rich, compelling works of art. Add her subtly powerful voice, touched with angelic grace and delicacy and you have a deservedly award-winning musical magician. The winner of two WAMMIE awards (Washington D.C. area music awards) for best CD and best female vocalist, largely in demand in the biz, and on a rare stay at her home in Virginia, I was lucky enough to visit with Vicky. And so we start at the beginning...

HR: You spent a lot of time at summer camp as a kid. How did that experience influence your musical development?

VPK: Camp, down in the Appalachian wilderness, is where I learned how to play guitar, and I was very influenced by folk music. It's primarily the reason why I play music and live in the mountains. It had a huge impact because I was so young. I was seven, eight years old when I first went, five hundred miles away from my family and out there amongst all these hippies! As I go along, it's in the back of my mind, I know I like to play music, and I know some songs on the guitar, and then when I actually put it into action in the world, it takes on a whole different thing.

HR: Do you have a musical family?

VPK: All of my siblings are also musical. My sister is a really good singer. She put out a tape of bluegrass music. She has a really great voice. She also likes to sing Celtic ballads. My little brother is one of those people who picks up every instrument and can play instantly and blow everyone away. But he doesn't play out professionally either. My older brother has done some acting. Our parents weren't musical, or the grandparents. For all of us, I think that early childhood experience at a camp that was so musical with people always playing and listening to music had something to do with it.

HR: Your great ability to write songs is so apparent, I can't help wondering where you picked that up from.

VPK: You wouldn't want to hear some of the crap I wrote sixteen years ago, when I first started writing songs! When I talk to other songwriters about what their techniques are, the changes they go through being a songwriter, it's all common ground. It's something you definitely get better at as you go along. I certainly feel like I've gotten better at it. I'm always thinking about what the next batch of songs is going to be like and hoping I can surpass what I've done. I feel like I've just started scratching the surface of getting into expressing the truth of my own soul. It's like peeling back those layers. At first you kind of dance around it and take a bit more risk and experiment, getting down to more of the truth. Usually when you're first writing songs, alot of it can be pretentious. You're singing about stuff that isn't really you're own experience.

HR: Does this mean your next album's going to be-

VPK: It's going to be much better! I have all the tunes that I would put on the album if I had to make it today. I've got a lot of songs and I've gathered what I think would be the next batch and I've started fooling around with demo-ing different ideas on the recorder. The songs that I've been writing lately are still personal less about boy-girl experiences. I feel like I'm taking more risks, I'm singing about what I'm experiencing. It's not that my other stuff was necessarily adolescent, but you can get your motivation from love, for instance, and be inspired by that and then have it come out as a song about rockets or something else. You can use metaphor in so many different ways. Whatever that initial juice is, you can take that and funnel it into something else. I have this new batch of songs that's more turning towards spiritual themes, very far out, open-minded. I have a song about St. Germain, one about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, another that I call "Open" that I wrote when I hit a big pothole in the Jersey Turnpike. It has my mother, Dan Rather and Mick Jagger and Krishna and Jesus and UFOs and Blue Oyster Cult and a dead deer! Musically the songs are more rhythmic and even more progressive. It's going towards what I call Sci-fi folk. Because it sounds like quirky, techy, whimsical but pop and melodic all at the same time.

HR: Would you say it will appeal to a wide audience?

VPK: Yeah, definitely. So far Blue Apples has appealed to a wide audience. Little children like it a lot, older people like it, college kids like it. It's not like everyone's gonna like it, but it does seem to have a broad appeal. I think ultimately, I've been influenced so much by pop music. A lot of the stuff that I like is real tuneful and musical.

HR: The songs on Blue Apples can definitely be described in those terms. There's such a nice balance between the vocals and the instrumentation. There's a wonderful diversity with the instrumentation, as well. Do you get a lot of input for arrangements and instruments from the musicians and co-producer or do you write with instruments in mind?

VPK: I write mostly with instruments in mind. The great thing about that record was being able to take all the ideas that had been floating around in my head and actually put 'em down. That's what also sets me apart from the folk thing. When people think folk, they tend to think sparse. For me, it's quite the contrary. I like huge, lush arrangements and production, because the type of music I like is very much produced. The production is a real intregal part of the song. When I went to record it, I had these ideas in my head and I was trying to explain them in whatever terms I could. Most of the production ideas on Blue Apples were mine as far as the instruments and the mood. 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. And I would convey these ideas to the other producer and fortunately he could translate those into notes and timing to the music.

HR: When you're writing, is there major laboring or is your inspiration swift?

VPK: It's both. I usually have a lot of lyrics. I'm always writing lyrics, always have tons of notebooks and I take them with me because I drive so much and I write a lot of lyrics on the road. Then I'll usually have several musical things that I'm working on. I definitely need to feel inspired to go and write although you can get disciplined and go and dig into it and a lot of times you don't think you're inspired and if you just put the guitar in your hand and you get your notebooks and tape recorder around you, then stuff will come through. Sometimes you have to set it up for it to happen. That's the main challenge with being on the road all the time because it's not a consistent thing. There's a certain place that I like to write. I like being in my bedroom. I don't have a separate music studio that I go in to. To me that's a cold, abstract environment. I like having my power things around me. Usually a certain time of the day is best, late afternoon. A lot of times songs will come in one big flood and it'll take ten minutes and other times I've labored on songs for months.

HR: What or who have been other influences on your music?

VPK: When I was younger, it was a lot of the classic acoustic poet/singer/songwriters: Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne. I've always gravitated towards the more progressive art rock. The group Yes has been a big influence, the way they write and that they're so high consciousness. The group Rush has some of the most powerful lyrics and it's in this great melodic, pop setting. Jethro Tull. I like anything that has a quirkiness to it. I don't really like normal sounding voices, I like odd sounding people. These groups have so many albums, there is such a wealth of material. I tend to like British folk rock. Richard Thompson is another big influence. It has that roots/traditional Celtic flavor to it.

HR: You were really into Fairport Convention then.

VPK: Yeah, and everything he's done since then.

HR: What do you think of the comparisons made of you to other artists?

VPK: People make comparisons because they need to but it would be nice it they compared you to something like a plant instead of another singer/songwriter! Some of the better comparisons I like, like the one where they compared me to Kate Bush, Nanci Griffith and David Byrne. Three such diverse people and having a male in there also was nice.

HR: Being that the musical arrangements are such an important part of your music, how is it for you when you're travelling and it's just you and your guitar?

VPK: It's a whole different thing. People say, you're up there night after night playing the same songs over and over, how do you do it? Bottom line, what makes a good performance is not so much that there's thousands of people or a lot of different elements, but if I feel what I'm playing. That makes the show. Going solo, I also have a lot more freedom. You can change the key of the song at the last second, you can sing in a different key and maybe that'll help me get into it more. You can tell a long story between songs, change the set list. You can get into the moment as much as possible. That's the fun and the beauty of going solo. I've done it for so long, I have a real love for it, even though what I would love is to have a seven piece band, dancing girls and the whole thing! It's such an intimate thing to perform solo so there's a real trade-off but there's enough going on with the freedom and doing whatever you want. It's simply having the emotion of the song. That takes on all different dimensions: the way you phrase something, the way you feel. That's the main thing people pick up on. You can be playing a song that isn't really that great, but if you're feeling it, people resonate with it, and if you're playing the greatest song in the world but you're distracted, thinking about what you're going to cook for dinner, there's a gap between you and the audience. The main challenge is to just be in the song.

HR: You tour occasionally with Don Conoscenti (reviewed in the previous two issues and Vicky's fiance) doing percussion and Greg Howard on Chapman stick. How has that been for you?

VPK: That's something that's recent and very exciting. The Chapman stick is an instrument that has such range and such flexibility that it's like having a full band. It has bass capabilities and lead guitar capabilities and keyboard sounds. My agent is going to start mostly booking the trio. When you play solo, it's great, but having a couple more members on stage, it gives it a more universal appeal and it turns it from a "me" experience into a "we" experience. There are more possiblities and options. What I'm writing and what we've been demo-ing over at Greg's studio wasn't written with this ensemble in mind but it's been taken to real nicely because things are more, like I said, progressive and rhythmic, still melodic and pop, but a little more edgy, more quirky, with different time signatures, more syncopation and those instruments accent it. Definitely great.

HR: Do you enjoy being on the road so much?

VPK: I do. I'm really cut out for it because I love to travel and I'm a real loner. I love the down time, driving and having the time to process and think, listen to music. Being able to travel and play gives you such a different perspective on what's out there and how your music affects people in different areas. The driving thing can get a little tedious, though, when you have huge hauls, and I drive a lot.

HR: 60,000 miles last year!

VPK: This year it'll be about 70,000.

HR: Yikes. Do you practice any healing arts, such as breathwork or yoga or meditation to augment your music and keep you sane on the road?

VPK: One of the things I really like to do is dance. I find that's a real healing thing for me, to have some sort of movement. A lot of times before I write I'll dance and a lot of times before I meditate I'll dance. Having music and movement and then stirring up a lot of that emotion can sometimes lead to a real catharsis. I do a lot of affirmations, creative visualization. It's interesting that I chose music as my career because in some cosmic way it sets me up to learn all the life lessons I'm supposed to learn. It's been an amazing journey. I was telling my brother the other day, music in some way has been a spiritual practice in itself because it's such a great discipline. You have to search yourself and you have to overcome your fears and confront rejection over and over. You have to not only bear your soul but dig down inside of it to find anything of use to write about, to say. It's like you're a piece of clay and this music keeps molding you and shaping you and digging stuff out of you. That has been my main spiritual practice. But I dabble in a lot of different things: astrology, wicca, alchemy. I'm interested in anything that has a transformational quality to it, where you can take something and change it and ultimately it becomes about changing yourself. If I'm going through anything, I have to write. It's a way for me to transform, to make some sense out of it, to make some poetry, some magic out of it.

HR: Anyone who hears your lyrics could feel no hesitation in calling you a poet.

VPK: Someday I hope to put out a book of poetry. Poetry speaks on so many more levels. People can get so much out of it and it's not necessarily what I was talking about. It's so multi-dimensional, like music. I really want to get into learning what the different tones are and how they affect you because for me (the music) is physical, it's emotional, it's cellular, it's spiritual, it affects all of your bodies.

HR: What is your goal for the future of your music?

VPK: To be a lounge singer on a UFO.