I worked at a Starbucks when I was living in Philly. It was a block away from one of the nicest hotels in the city, so sometimes famous people would come in. One Sunday morning I got to work at 5:30 and opened the store at 6:00. We usually didn’t get any customers until about 7 or so. A few minutes after I unlocked the front door a man came in and ordered a coffee. I looked at him after I handed him a Tall drip and said “You look just like that guy from Phish.” He said “I am that guy from Phish!” I can remember the conversation so well. I said “I don’t know why I feel like I can say this to you, but I hate your band. But you are one of the greatest guitarists alive.” He said “Only two other people have ever said that to me. My best friend and my wife.” We both kinda freaked out. He asked if I was a musician. I said I was and that my band had just broken up. Phish had broken up a little while before, and he was on tour with Les Claypool. He said that when you are in a band everyone has a certain role. It is like a circle that keeps shape because everyone is holding their part of it. When one person tries to take over the role of someone else, the circle breaks. I told him that that was exactly why my band had broken up. We both freaked out again. He told me that now he was playing with other really famous people and that he was having a hard time dealing with respecting other peoples egos and making the music work. We talked for another 20 minutes or so about songwriting and music. We were finishing each others sentences and we were both totally bugged out at how much we had in common in our ways of thinking. Other customers started to come in so I said that I had to start working again. He repeated my name over and over so that he would remember it and said goodbye. I have met a whole lot of celebrities and he by far was the nicest one I have ever met. I know that if we ever meet again he will remember me. Now when I hear Phish I actually like it and feel lucky that for one Sunday morning, we found a friend in each other.
My first guitar was a classical Yamaha. A year or so after I started playing, I wondered what it would sound like if my strings were tuned differently. I instantly began writing twice as many songs than before when I started using alternate tunings. Everyone who plays guitar knows all the basic chords. I wanted to do something different. In my life I have written over 100 sings and about 6 are in standard tuning. When a guitar is in a different tuning, you have to re-learn how to play. I have worked in three guitar stores. All day long, the guys I worked with would jam on the store’s guitars. So every once in a while, I would tune a guitar my way and play (maybe sing) one of my songs. People would freak out. Not only was I good, they had no idea what chords I was playing because of my alternate tunings. I used to always play acoustic guitars. With electrics it always seemed like anyone could sound good with the right effects and pedals. You can’t fake your playing skills on an acoustic guitar. Because of my different tunings, I used to bring at least 5 guitars with me to play shows. When I first started working at Guitar Center about 4 or so years ago, I didn’t know the difference between a telecaster and a stratocaster. I did know a lot about acoustics though. Electric guitars, I thought, were for people who played lead guitar. I have never been interested in playing solos. Then I heard about the VG-88. It is a pedal that basically can make your guitar sound like anything. It is used with a midi pick up, that can change the tuning of your guitar through the pedal without actually changing the physical tuning. Basically you press a button, and it’s like having a differently tuned guitar. It changed my life. I had to get an electric guitar for it because it doesn’t work with acoustics. I bought a 1980 Ovation electric UK2 guitar and had the midi pick up installed. It took me a while to understand how the pedal worked but it has saved my life. Instead of having to bring 5 or more guitars with me to shows, I now only have to bring one. I now play a Roland Ready Strat because the midi pick up is built in and is way better than the one you can install on a guitar. While working at guitar stores I became interested in building and fixing guitars. I took a guitar building class at this little guitar store. Half-way through the class, I was helping others in the class. I became the teachers apprentice and then was the manager of the shop. I ran the store and did the repairs. For some reason guitar repair makes so much sense to me. Unfortunately we had to close the shop because of the economy. Since then, I have been doing repair at my little shop I made at home.
I started noticing how hard it is for a female to be taken seriously as a musician when I was around 17. In high school, I pretty much played at least one show a week. I grew up in Fairfield, CT, but when I came back from reform school my family moved to Trumbull, CT. I went to Trumbull High School for my junior and senior year. Fairfield High School was at least three times bigger than Trumbull High. A lot of my friends from Fairfield were in bands. I was pretty much the only musician that played shows in my high school. I was also the only girl who played shows. All of my musician friends were guys. The kind of bands they had were ska, hardcore, jam, and rock bands. I was just this blonde chick playing acoustic guitar and singing in my high, pretty voice. People used to compare me to Jewel. They thought what I was doing was cute. I hated that. My guy friends in bands were considered cool, not cute. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted respect from my other musician friends, but I never really got it from them. A lot of people came to my shows though. I would actually sell out shows and get paid for them every week. My guy musician friends would play about once a month and would only sometimes get paid for them. When I was 19, my friend Matt Anderson heard my music and really liked it. He had been in a bunch of bands in high school. I thought my songs were too girly to be made into rock music. Matt made my songs rock. This was all I had ever wanted. My friend Carlos played drums in a cover band in Trumbull and he liked my music too. We went to a friend of a friends house to record a few songs. His name was John. We didn’t have a bassist yet, so Matt was going to play bass on the recording. Bass was actually John’s main instrument, so he played on the record and joined the band. A few months after we started playing shows, I got $135,000 from a lawsuit from my mothers death. So we all went to the studio and recorded START. I had to get out of Connecticut before I spent all my money, so I moved to Philadelphia. It sucked breaking up my first band when I moved, but I just had to. About a year or so after I moved to Philly, I started playing again with my new band Friends of Sven. It was the first time that my bandmates wanted some creative control of the music. It was really hard for me. I thought of my songs as sacred. It took a couple months of crying and fighting with my band to get over it. What happened after that was amazing. They actually made my songs better. It felt like we really were a band. I really don’t remember how or why we broke up. I started a new band called the Living Dark. A year or so after that, I ended up having to move back home to Connecticut. I played solo shows under the name the Living Dark and did so until about a year ago. I thought it was a lot cooler than just being Kari Bunn. I got a manager who is my good friend, Meg. She thought I should just be Kari Bunn again, so that is how I am billed now. She helps me a lot. It is really hard to do this on my own. I feel so lucky to have her as a manager. I am now playing with this awesome drummer named Christine. She is the first female bandmate I have ever had. She is amazing.
In my previous blog I talked about meeting Gary. He had a public access TV show called Obsessed With Gary. He would interview people and have musicians play on the show. He invited me to play on his show in NYC. I played 2 songs. Lisa Loeb actually saw it and called the show and said she loved my music and gave me tickets to see a show of hers. He also had a friend who was an A&R guy for a record company. I also talked about him in another blog a few days ago. His label wanted to sign me, but they wanted me to go on tour with the Lillith Fair. It was an all female tour that Sarah McLachian made. To me, it seemed like it was a bunch of girls who were pissed off that they were not cool enough to play Lallapalooza. I thought about playing it for a few days. But I really didn’t want to be a part of something just because I also have a vagina. I had no interest in playing shows with Jewel and the Indigo Girls. I was also 17 and just got out of reform school. So I said no to the Lillith fair. When I was 14, my mother died in a car accident. When I was 19, my family won a lawsuit from it and I all of a sudden had $135,000. I was working at a Starbucks in Westport, CT. We had a customer, named Ray Bardani, who I became friends with. He was an engineer and he really liked my music. I asked him to make a record with me in the summer of 2000. The whole thing cost me about $20,000. It was called START. When you opened up the CD case, there was a picture of me in a cowboy hat. Somehow my manager at the time got my CD to Faith Hill and Tim McGraw’s label. They wanted to buy a song on it called Love’s Address. But they also wanted me to play Lillith Fair to promote me as an artist. I literally had to hang up on their people a few times after I told them I would not do it. In the music industry, all you have is your first impression. I had no interest in being in the same category as the other chicks that played the fair. The bands that I loved and still do were the Get Up Kids, At The Drive In, Sunny Day Real Estate and the Pixies. I felt I had nothing in common with the Lillith Fair girls. Somehow a little after that, Stetson contacted my manager. They were looking for a rock musician to promote cowboy hats and be a spokesperson for a fragrance they were coming out with. Since I would sometimes wear a cowboy hat anyway I thought it was awesome. All I had to do was always wear one and they would basically be my record company. They would pay for promotion and a tour bus and anything I needed. Another awesome thing was that they were going to put my record in the box of every hat they sold. It was pretty much guaranteed that I would get a gold record within a few months based on that alone. Then 9/11 came. The people I was dealing with died that day. So that deal went up in smoke with them. A few months later, I saw a commercial for the fragrance I was supposed to be promoting. Matthew McConaughey got my job. A few years later I made friends with a guy named John. He ran Sunny Day Real Estate’s web site. They had just broken up and the lead guitarist, Dan Hoener wanted to start a female fronted band. John gave Dan my number and Dan and I would sent our music to each other. I was going to be in a band with him. It was kinda a big deal. It was written about in a few magazines. Then he kinda went crazy and moved to Washington and I never heard from him again. My song Diamond is about him.
I went to a reform/emotional growth school in Running Springs, CA called CEDU from April 1994 through June 1996. A few months later I went to Irving Plaza in NYC to see Julianna Hatfield and Tanya Donelly (Belly had broken up recently) with my friend Ross. It was Tanya’s first big show for her new solo record after Belly broke up. I was in front crying like it was my own Beatlemania. During the show, I met a man named Gary. After the show, a guy who just came from backstage gave me his backstage pass. He said “Go meet her.” Gary was standing near Tanya. I ran to her and she was there with open arms for me. She held me like a baby as I cried in her arms. She told me she saw me crying and was so happy I got backstage to meet her. I told her she was my hero. Since this was her first show since Belly broke up, the room was filled with music industry people. A lot of guys in suits. Here I came, a 17 year old girl, bursting with tears, running past them to meet my hero. I told told her I was a songwriter. She asked me if I had any of my music with me. I had a cassette of my songs that I had to give to Gary to write down my name and number on it because I was shaking too much to do it myself. I had a camera with me and Gary took a few pictures of us together. She signed my backstage pass and wrote “You are the sweetest of the humans.” I also exchanged info with Gary. She hugged and kissed me goodbye. I ran downstairs and out of the club to find Ross. We got to Grand Central Station too late and had to wait for the last train to Connecticut for an hour or so. I cried and cried and cried all the way home. About a week later my phone rang. I picked up the phone and it was Tanya Donelly. I had a friend named Tanya from high school and I thought it was her. She said it was wonderful to meet me. In shock I said “Wait…is this Tanya Donelly from Belly?” When she said “yes”, I held my hand over the phone and screamed so loud that she must have heard me. She told me that she listened to my music and she loved my songs and my voice. She told me she was going to play a show in NYC again soon and told me I would be on the guest list and wanted me to come. I thanked her over and over and told her I would come to the show. A few weeks later I came home from school to find a message on my answering machine from her telling me that the venue had changed for the show and that she hoped I could still make it. I got to the show about an hour before it started. I gave my I.D. at the ticket booth. The ticket guy sighed in relief. He told me that Tanya was so worried that I might not have gotten her message. He ran backstage to tell her I was there. The show was amazing. After the show I went backstage. Gary was there as well. We talked for about 20 minutes. She offered me a beer and wanted me to hang out for a while with her. I was completely freaked out that my hero wanted me as a friend. I was blessed. A year or so later, I got a Belly tattoo on my ankle. I went to go see her play a little show in Boston with my friend Jon. I had just made my first record called START. She walked to the stage and saw me in the front. She was so happy to see me! I showed her my tattoo and she jumped up and down. After the show, I gave her my CD and said goodbye. A few years after that, I was living in Philly and went to see her at the TLA. After a few songs, she saw me in the crowd and ran to the front of the stage to give me a kiss. She told me that she had lost my CD and was so sad about it. Luckily I had one with me. Her husband, Dean was playing bass for her. I joked with her and gave the CD to her husband so she wouldn’t loose it again. Everyone in the room stared at me and couldn’t believe she stopped the show to say hello to me. I said goodbye to her after the show and walked down South St. in tears of joy. My hero loves me. I am so lucky!
About 80% of my friends are either musicians or artists. Painters, photographers, guitarists, drummers, piano players, bassists, singers, engineers, graffiti artists, and so on. Most of them are “true” artists. What I mean by that is that they don’t really have a choice of doing anything else. They may be good at other things, but their art is life to them. Then there are the people who do it for fun. I have worked at a lot of guitar/music stores. It doesn’t take long to tell the difference. We can smell our own. I sometimes wish I could be one of the people who do it for fun. They can spend hours everyday learning different scales on their guitar. They can carefully plan what colors and paintbrushes they will use to paint with. They can feel like rock stars being in a cover band. I have never thought of music as fun. I really wish I could. When I was 17, there was an A&R guy who was really interested in signing me to the label he worked for. One day, I went to his apartment in NYC to play for him. I played a few songs. I noticed that his eyes were closed the whole time. I asked why. He told me something that I could not believe at the time. He said that someday, every piece of music I would listen to would be through the ear of a critic. Maybe not a critic, but someone who knows the difference between good and bad music. He said that someday it would be hard for me to listen to music that I would soon know was by people who played for fun. He had his eyes closed the whole time because I was like fresh air to him. My music was pure and true. Only a few years later I realized that he was dead on correct.
I am a singer/songwriter/guitarist. I started writing and playing music when I was 10. I am going to be 30 in November; so I have been playing and writing for almost 20 years. Some of my earliest memories are of music. I realized that I understood music and the way songs are put together at a very young age. I always knew I wanted to write songs. I never thought that I would be a good enough singer to actually be on the radio or anything though. Some of my earliest influences were pop singers like Madonna, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. When I was around 9 or 10, I had a nanny named Lima. She had the back of her head shaved and would wear black lipstick. She brought a videotape of Kate Bush videos to my house once and I have never been the same. She did and does have an amazing voice; but she was so completely different than any of the pop singers I would hear on the radio or see on MTV. Lima also would tape 120 minutes for me to watch when she saw how much I loved Kate Bush. She would also take me to this little record store called Secret Sounds. I was an 11 year old girl hanging out in a record store with giant posters of the Talking Heads and the Lemonheads. When I was 12 or 13, I saw the video for “Feed the Tree” by Belly. A beautiful blonde singing in the trees with her band. I somehow knew then that I could do it. Lima used to take me to shows with her. She took me to go see Belly at Toad’s Place in New Haven. I think I was 13. Her songs were somewhat pop, but different enough that she was somewhere in the middle between the ultra pop singers and Kate Bush. Belly and Kate Bush are still very important musical influences for me. I still feel really lucky that I had someone who made me “cool” at such a young age. By the time I was 13, I was also listening to Bjork, the Lemonheads, Throwing Muses, the Breeders, the Pixies and Juliana Hatfield. I was also listening to Pearl Jam and Nirvana like everyone else was; but I also knew that Kurt Cobain’s hero was Frank Black. What kind of 13 year old knew that back then? By the time I was 14, I was the girl who knew cool music. Not that I was really “cool”. But I liked it. I was ahead of my peers in that way, and I owe it all to my nanny, Lima.
I have never been a reader of blogs. I really don’t know what people usually write about in blogs. But, I do have a strong belief of asking the universe for what you need through writing.
I think that one of the reasons people keep journals and diaries is that sometimes, when you write about what you want, it comes to you. It has happened to me before.
I have been nervous about starting a blog. What will I write about? Will anyone actually read this? Do I really think I am important enough that people will care about what I have to say?
I am excited about the possibility of cataloging my thoughts and things about me.
So, this is my first blog.
