DAYNA KURTZ

In April of last year, New Jersey native Dayna Kurtz escaped to the desert to write the songs for her fourth album. "I completed most of the songs for Another Black Feather in a hermitage maintained by some lovely people for solitary religious introspection. I stayed in an adobe hut on 500 acres in the Sonoran desert in Arizona. There was no electricity, nobody around for miles, a cot, a table, chair and pitcher. 2 weeks. I brought no distractions – no novels, only books of writing exercises and poetry. It was so quiet at night I could hear the blood beat in my ears. It was sublime, and I wrote constantly.

Making the album came just as easily. "We recorded the basics live to tape, 2 or 3 takes per song, and picked the best of 'em right then. I love analog. When you record digitally it just requires too much imagination to hear how good it might sound when you've overdubbed, mixed and mastered. When you record to tape, it sounds like a record right out of the gate. Co-producing the album with Dayna was Randy Crafton, who has worked with Dayna on all 3 of her studio albums. Another Black Feather finds Dayna leaning more heavily on her roots and country influences than usual, in particular making generous use of her new lap steel guitar, and showcasing her prodigious slide work on other songs.

Dayna Kurtz began performing her original compositions in public as a teenager, and subsequently spent the better part of a decade touring solo across the back roads of America, selling CD's out of her trunk and mesmerizing club and festival crowds with her riveting live performances. Along the way, she opened shows for the likes of Richie Havens (who became a fan and lent guest vocals to her debut studio album, Postcards from Downtown). The last few years has found Dayna winning over new fans in the New York City music scene. In the past two years she has been invited to open up for Rufus Wainwright, Antony & the Johnsons, and Keren Ann. Additionally, Dayna has won over fellow "Living Room" habitué Norah Jones, who sings a duet with Dayna on "I Got It Bad…" (From Beautiful Yesterday). Outside of her new hometown, the legendary Richard Thompson invited Dayna to open up for a coast-to-coast nationwide tour that found Dayna converting some of his faithful fans.

The fan response and critical attention generated by Kurtz's grass roots touring efforts inevitably drew interest from the mainstream music industry. Despite her indie status, Dayna has found an enthusiastic audience, winning high-profile guest spots on such radio shows as World Cafe, Mountain Stage and NPR's Morning Edition. But nowhere has the interest in Dayna's music been more pronounced than in Holland, where Dayna's debut studio album soared into the top 20 of the album charts on the strength of the hit single "Love Gets in the Way". In the summer of 2003, Dayna went from performing in front of 50 people at the Living Room in New York City's lower east side, to headlining the fabled Paradiso theatre in Amsterdam in front of 1000 people in what would be her first of many sold out shows in the Netherlands in the months to follow. Dayna has since then discovered a larger audience in Europe, and this spring alone will find her in Greece, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the UK. But Dayna Kurtz has worked too hard to allow such adulation to go to her head.