Two
simultaneous Top 20 Billboard Country Singles hits.
A guest appearance on Good Morning America. A standing
ovation at the 40th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards,
and a performance with 80’s legends Bon Jovi.
So
how did a lesbian folk rocker from Michigan become the toast
of Nashville?
Kristen
Hall, who began her music career as a guitar tech for the Indigo
Girls and developed into a solo performer known for her compelling
acoustic sets, is enjoying sudden fame as a country artist with
the band Sugarland. Fifteen years after the release of her homemade
debut record, Real Life Stuff, Hall is shaking up Nashville
with band mates Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush. She wrote
the majority of the songs on Sugarland’s debut album,
Twice the Speed of Life, which was certified platinum
last month. At age 41, Hall is currently enjoying the biggest
success of her career. [Ed. Update: Hall left Sugarland in January 2006.]
Raised
in a suburb of Detroit, Hall showed an early affinity for music,
learning guitar by age 13, writing songs soon after and citing
Jackson Browne, James, Taylor, Neil Young and The Beatles as
influences. But she was pressured to pursue a more traditional
career and eventually put her musical aspirations on the back-burner.
Hall worked odd jobs—selling shoes, working in a pizza
parlor—and took college courses in Peachtree, Georgia
when her family relocated there.
Boredom
eventually brought her to Atlanta, and through some fortuitous
coincidences, she found herself helping out in the recording
studio where the Indigo Girls were recording their debut EP
in 1987. Hall told Acoustics Magazine in 1992 that
she received a co-producer credit on the EP, “basically
for making coffee,” and soon after the Girls were covering
her songs.
Indigo
Girl Amy Ray was one
of Hall’s most outspoken supporters, regularly goading
her into joining them onstage to perform. Hall remembered in
the same interview with Acoustics, “I had really
bad stage fright, but Amy would encourage me to get up there
and do it. I’ll bet she introduced me on 40 or 50 different
occasions, and ‘whoosh’ I’d be out the door.
But she never gave up and eventually I did go.”
In
1989 she recorded her first demo, Kristen Hall, in
her home and played with different incarnations of her Kristen
Hall Band for a year and a half. She eventually returned to
playing solo, and with renewed confidence in herself as both
a songwriter and performer, she released her first record, Real
Life Stuff in 1990. The release helped her secure a publishing
deal with BMG records, and in 1992 she was signed to Amy Ray’s
independent label, Daemon Records.
Ray
described Hall to lesbian magazine Deneuve (now Curve)
in 1994 as “the ultimate pop songwriter. She can use the
same three chords in ten songs and it’ll sound completely
different. The songs seem very simple when you listen to ‘em
at first, but in reality the songs she writes are the hardest
songs to write: catchy and sincere and not calculated.”
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