If you’re a locally renowned singer-songwriter, you’re bound to touch base, talk shop and get support from other renowned songwriters. And sometimes that interaction even happens onstage. “It’s a strange job and a strange life,” says Kris Delmhorst, who made her name locally and now lives in Western Massachusetts. “There’s become a network of trust and collaboration that I rely on creatively. And no matter how long I live out here, I’ll always feel that the Cambridge scene will be part of my home community.”
She will join a pair of fellow songwriters, Deb Talan and Heather Maloney, for an “in the round” concert at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard next Wednesday; with all three onstage together. All three started their careers here and went onto build a national following. Talan has returned to solo status after a successful run with the Weepies, a duo with her then-husband. And Delmhorst has earned a rep as one of the more inventive songwriters around, drawing from alternative pop as well as acoustic music.
She may also be the first songwriter in history to rhyme “mercies” with “Xerxes,” the ancient Persian emperor. That song, “Nothing Bout Nothing,” appears on her last album “Long Day in the Milky Way<” whose atmospheric production and rich arrangements place it well outside the acoustic mainstream.
“I was trying to write about the hubris of humanity,” she explains. “So I went down this rabbit hole of reading about famous hubristic people in the world. And I read about Xerxes trying to get across the Aegean, the weather was bad and to get his boat across, he had people literally whipping the ocean with whips. That seemed a perfect metaphor for the delusional sense of control that humans have over the world.”
“I’ve always had a problem with that word ‘folksinger,’” she said. “To me it’s associated with a social commentary role, and that’s something I don’t take up explicitly very often. The way I write is from the inside out, sometimes I don’t know what a song is quote-unquote ‘about’ until it’s done. Rock, pop and jazz is really where I come from. Before I started doing it the closest I came to folk music was someone like Tracy Chapman — very song based but still in the popular music world. Or someone like Sinead, which is all anyone can talk about right now.”
She also has an enduring love for the Cars, and devoted a full album to their songs a few years back. “That was an interesting one. Some of my fans said ‘Ha ha, see you on the next one.’ But some people loved it so much, and probably connected to that record more than other things I’ve done. That will happen when you go on tangents, and that’s fine. Doing that one was a joy all the way through.”
Recently Delmhorst was involved with another meaningful project, an album of songs by the late Morphine drummer Billy Conway. She and a number of notable singers (including her husband Jeffrey Foucault and Conway’s wife Laurie Sargent) made music in Conway’s house during his illness, after his passing they polished the tapes into an album that was released last January.
“Everybody knew Billy was an incredible drummer, but there are so many layers to his participation in music. When he was leaving the building there were always people in the next room laughing and crying, making music and telling stories. It became a way for all of us to grieve together, to process it all as a group.” They are still hoping to get together and perform the album live. “We’d really love to do that. But at the moment the logistics are a little extreme, and the emotional content is too.”