“You’ll
know me because my head will be shaved,” she told me over
the phone the day before we meet for coffee in Royal Oak. She was
right.
With her long, long hair recently shorn, Audra Kubat with a timid
smile. The tall 31-year-old singer/songwriter is wearing a red-and-white
striped shirt that makes her look like Sinead O’Connor in
the part of a 19th-century British navy deckhand. But stunning,
of course.
A recent New York émigré by way of Detroit, modern
folk artist Kubat’s fourth solo CD, Since I Fell in Love
with the Music (Times Beach), was just released and, like much
of her previous work, is an aural smorgasbord of poetic songwriting,
ethereal vocals, and soft layers of instrumentation. It is, as she
puts it, music without an edge—which is exactly what she hopes
will help it stand out against the more-ballsy New York music scene.
In fact, it’s in her songs’ simplicity—in the
subtle flutes, pianos, strings, and manipulations of her delicate
voice—that Kubat’s talent can best be found. She is,
if anything, soothing to listen to. The sort of music that unobtrusively
works its way inside you and then lingers there for hours afterwards.
Kubat takes the last sip from her coffee I will see her indulge
in. She forgets all about the drink as she starts talking about
playing open mikes and putting on her own shows in New York.
As we sit street side, cars whizzing by and nearby train grumbling
along, it becomes quickly obvious to me that her time on the East
Coast has taught her a thing or two about herself. Her flight there
followed a tumultuous two-year marriage that left her depressed
and searching for something. Anything. What she found, I think,
has provided her the self-assurance and willingness to confront
the personal and professional truths we discuss.
“I kind of fell in love for a while and that distracted me
completely,” says Kubat of her first months in New York, a
wintry time that made exploration of her new environ difficult.
“It’s so much easier to stay inside and snuggle than
go out in the cold. As soon as I realized how in love I was, though,
I became fearful that I’d lose that love. It kind of took
my mind away from what I was supposed to be doing and, when I realized
what was happening, I got really depressed.”
The two, both musicians, ultimately decided to call the relationship
off for a while, to help each refocus their efforts on the musical
goals both have. “I was looking for other people to fulfill
me because something in me lacked,” she says. Now, I’m
either going to live and make myself live, or I’m going to
die.”
Which leads us to the haircut. “So I cut my hair off,”
she explains of the dramatic change that took place over several
weeks, inches off at first and then more and more until a barber
had to fix her self-inflicted hack job. “Cause I felt like
I was at the bottom and it’s only up from here. It represents
how I feel, that I went through some pain. You know how you dig
in the ground and see layers and can look back and see society and
what people were doing culturally and all that? In a way, I felt
like maybe my hair represented that too. Now, every time I look
at myself, I’m reminded of why I’m doing what I’m
doing.”
When I ask her how her family reacted to the new look, she says
they were worried because they knew how depressed she had been,
but they understood. For now, she’s just glad to be home with
them (at least for a while) and to promote Since I Fell in Love
with the Music. Oh, and there’s also the fact that she
can afford to hit a bar or two here too.
“You can’t drink in [New York City] bars because it’s
too expensive,” she laughs. “You have to drink at home.
If you do get out, you can only afford to have one beer cause the
Stroh’s are like five bucks there. I get $1.50 Stroh’s
in Detroit, man.”
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