There are musicians who create a world, who carry you out of your own geography with a nearly operatic skill. The way it happens is yet another mystery that defies mastery, but everything (this old, thick-sounding guitar rather than that bright one; a slightly draggy drummer; lyrics only one person could have written) must work together as a singular, quicksilver event. All the better when it happens without theater, when you hear a collection of songs that don’t demand look at me look at me, but instead fold themselves into your personal soundtrack in such a way that the album and the period you couldn’t stop listening it become one inextricable thing.

Dayna Kurtz is just this skillful; I’ve never heard anyone quite like her. Her original songs are entirely original, and cover a vocal range that begins with a chanteuse and ends in a fury. Her voice is so rich, the tone so dark, that there is a moment in every song where you could be listening to a man or a woman. Her narratives and musicianship are neither masculine or feminine – in Dayna’s songs grief is human, and so is lust, and nostalgia, and the sense of being either trapped or too free. When she covers a song, I never want to hear it done by anyone else. The delicacy of her interpretation and the way she shares with the great jazz singers a powerful sense of when not to sing, combine to make old songs fresh and alive, and render the familiar not rewritten, but re-membered. This doubling of time – we are in a place we remember from long ago, and we are simultaneously in the immediate moment – make her a performer both powerful and sublime. I saw her sing a standard one night at a party. She was sitting on a kitchen chair in a blue dress, playing a guitar that wasn’t her own, and she sang softly (even though her voice is huge) and everyone quieted. It doesn’t happen often that I see someone performing at the fine edge of her vocation, but I saw it then.

I remember hearing someone say, during that year Bonnie Raitt broke out and won all those Grammys, that he was happy for her success and at the same time wished she still belonged to him. He knew he’d never again see her in a little cave-like club in Memphis; he’d never again be the guardian of her singular talent. I listen to Dayna Kurtz more than almost any other musician. I put on her records and go about my business, moving from room to room, and sometimes I can only hear her faintly, the liquid lifting-up of a flourish at the end of a song, maybe. At those times she sounds like a woman on the other side of a wall. I press my ear up against it. I want her to stay right there, a wind from the past blowing through an open window, and I want her to be embraced by the whole world, even though it would mean she’d no longer belong to me. --Haven Kimmel

Featuring guest appearances by Norah Jones and Ethel

"More Austin than Lucinda Williams and more southern than Shelby Lynne..."

- Rolling Stone.com

"Kurtz is an uncompromising force. . . " Uncut