From Moldy Peaches to Juno to 'Sesame Street'
The Curious Career of Kimya Dawson
On her way to Charleston, S.C., for the 37th stop on her North American tour
this spring, Kimya Dawson, the former self-described “girl part of the
Moldy Peaches,” fears the GPS is in cahoots with the KKK. With at least
one hand on the steering wheel, she precariously holds up her end of a
phone interview, dodging pickup trucks bearing Confederate flags on one
of South Carolina’s scenic byways.
Raised
in Bedford Hills, N.Y., Dawson admits to having taken only a few guitar
lessons at the age of 16, abandoning formal musical instruction
altogether until age 26. In the late-’90s, with fellow
singer/songwriter Adam Green, she formed the anti-folk duo The Moldy
Peaches. The pair donned animal costumes and relied on barely
serviceable melodies to accompany their lyrical absurdities.
Since
The Moldy Peaches disbanded in 2004, Dawson released five solo albums,
gave birth to a daughter, Panda Delilah, and toiled contentedly in
relative obscurity until the recent success of Juno catapulted her, via the film’s soundtrack, to the top of the Billboard charts.
The Juno soundtrack
relies heavily on Dawson, and serves as a retrospective of sorts.
Nearly half of Dawson’s tracks for the film were culled from three of
her solo albums, many of them from 2006’s Remember That I Love You. Newer
collaborations with Antsy Pants appear on the album, as does The Moldy
Peaches’ “Anyone Else But You,” co-written and performed with Adam
Green.
Though her solo
efforts coexisted with The Moldy Peaches, Dawson’s songwriting retains
the pared-down, do-it-herself instrumentation of her former band
without the Peaches’ scatological humor. A marked departure from the
charming puerility of “Who’s Got the Crack?” and “Downloading Porn with
Davo,” songs for which The Moldy Peaches are best known outside the
anti-folk circuit, Dawson strums earnestly along to lyrics that reveal
an aching vulnerability. On “Tire Swing” she sings, “I got one hand on
the steering wheel, one waving out the window / if I’m a spinster for
the rest of my life / my yarns will keep me warm on cold and lonely
nights.”
While Dawson and Green reunited for a few appearances in support of Juno, including
a performance on ABC’s morning estrogen-fest “The View,” Dawson
envisions the chance of recording with Green again as a
post-apocalyptic fantasy. “The dust will clear,” she portends, “and
I’ll crawl out into a totally desolate abandoned wasteland and there
will be Adam, and I’ll be like [sings], ‘This is shitty, all my friends
are dead,’ and he’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, pat me on my head,’ and we’ll
make up some songs. But right now I feel our universes are not
aligned.”
Of late, Dawson’s taste for collaborators suits her
present incarnation as both eternal child and mother. “My ultimate
dream collaboration might happen; I’ve always wanted to do a duet with
Grover. I got a phone call from a producer of ‘Sesame Street’ last week
and told her about my fantasy, and she’s trying to make it happen.”
Despite her sudden mainstream success, Dawson remains the anti-diva.
She’s equal parts mother and musician, and her forthcoming effort, a
children’s album titled Alphabutt, promises to lend confluence to those roles.
Dawson,
however, dismisses the notion that her other records are less
daycare-friendly, insisting that “all albums are child-appropriate, but
not all parents agree … A lot of kids who like my stuff say, ‘I wanted
to take your CD to show and tell, but my teacher doesn’t like it when
you say ‘fucking cock.’ So I had to make a show-and-tellfriendly
album.”
Promoting a children’s album is somewhat uncharted
territory for a singer-songwriter. When asked about the logistics of
such an endeavor, Dawson is nonchalant. With her 2-year-old daughter in
tow on the road, Dawson is more than willing to play for audiences too
young to stay up after dark. She half-jests, “I’ve been thinking about
doing a tour called ‘The Nine O’ Clock Curfew Tour,’ where I don’t play
any shows that end after nine. This staying up ‘til 11 stuff is
bullshit.”
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