When I was much younger and more ambitious about seeking out new music I would stay up late on a Sunday night and try to stay awake thru “120 Minutes” on MTV. While most of my other classmates were into Pearl Jam or some other popular band, I craved something different, and I’d go to great lengths to find music out of the mainstream. I had a couple of friends with whom I could compare notes about the newest stuff we found. Lord knows, Z100 didn’t play the kind of stuff we wanted to hear. I also patrolled the local CD swap shop; the only store I knew of that had a bonafide “Alternative” section, and the only place to buy second-hand.
These days, I take a much lazier approach to new music. I listen to XM or Pandora and mark the occasional song that piques my interest. On rare occasion, I stumble upon a new artist completely out of the blue. One such example is Kate Miller-Heidke. I think somebody twittered a link to this video a couple of months back:
I thought, “Hey, that’s a cute song… She’s got an incredible voice!” I did a little more digging, and discovered her YouTube page, and promptly watched most of her uploads. I immediately fell in love with this song and video!
At this point I was hooked, I HAD to have her album with that song, but the only place I found it was as an Australian import on Amazon for 38 bucks. YIKES! Lucky for me, I have a friend studying there, and he bought it for me. Phew, crisis averted! Now it’s on regular rotation in my iTunes.
Kate’s talent seems just about endless… her songs have an often unapologetic honesty to them that I just haven’t heard from many other female artists (perhaps I’m just not listening to the right ones). Also, her classically-trained soprano voice makes an occasional, unexpected appearance in a lot of her songs, which is really a treat for me! Check out the video of Kate covering “Psycho Killer.” It cracks me up every time!
I just checked yesterday, and she released a new EP on iTunes (including the Facebook song), but “I Can’t Shake It” isn’t on there. However, it’s a nice selection of her repertoire.
