Kalyn Fay’s music seems to be made of open space and complicated questions. When the singer-songwriter took the stage at LowDown last weekend to perform a mix of new and old material, her earthy voice cut straight through the din of jazz bar ambiance and hit a crowd all too willing to sing along with her potent blend of Cherokee Americana.
Her backing band included some of Tulsa’s best young performers: Cellist and keys player Matt Magerkurth as bandleader, Olivia McGraw on violin, Cody Clinton on electric guitar, Stephen Schultz on bass, and Jake Lynn on drums. The group was tight, understated, and obviously well-practiced, performing arrangements that bent around Fay’s songs like wind around trees: augmenting, but not intruding upon, a deeply rooted sound. Fay mentioned that she didn’t often perform with a band; that’s a shame. They helped the powerful songwriter reach even higher.
Dressed for the first part of the night in dramatic black satin, Fay opened with “Cherokee County,” her clear-as-a-bell voice extolling the virtues and the foibles of a town that could be Tahlequah or any of the surrounding small ones in that part of the state: “I think about it every now and then: Oklahoma town where nothing really happens.” As someone who comes from that neck of Green Country, from one of those little towns where nothing really happens, I couldn’t help but be affected right away.
Lyrics-led and sometimes depression-forward, Fay’s music counts on listeners being affected. Even so, she warned the audience many times about the sadness and struggle present in the songs. Knowing her music beforehand, I didn’t need a content warning from her; plus, there’s a pessimism in these songs that’s almost healing. Much of the material (and Fay’s affable banter) bent around the confluence of her Native and Baptist identities, experiences of that Native identity being invalidated, the need to stake one’s claim as a person of a particular origin. But which origin, when one contains multitudes? It’s one of the many good questions her music asks.
The show’s first section featured some great new songs: “Judadatla Tsisqwa (Spotted Bird),” a song entirely sung in Cherokee, detailed the struggle of Fay’s father against an owl determined to alight on the family’s back fence; “Honeysuckle,” a finger-picked piece about letting love go, opined about the smell of the sweet weed; and “Family,” which Fay called her “emo banger,” hit loudest and hardest. Despite what Fay refers to as the “chill” nature of the songs—even suggesting that the audience might fall asleep from the music—spirits were high as she ended the first set of new material.
For the second half of the show, Fay did a costume change into a red jacket and bolo tie: the country portion of the night, she announced, had arrived. Opening with “Baby Don’t You Worry” and “Come Around” (Fay’s strongest recorded chorus to date), she and the band loosened up, letting go of tight arrangements and aiming towards fun. “Cigarette Machine” by Fred Eaglesmith was a memorable cover, and “Tulsa,” her highest-streamed song on Spotify, came last: “I hate this song,” Fay told the audience, “but it makes me the most money.”
Ain’t that the way it goes? Not everything we love will love us back, and vice-versa. Fay breathlessly plumbs complicated emotions like this: she’s got the emotional range and tenor of a Phoebe Bridgers or a Lucy Dacus, but with the country and Native twangs to complicate the story. The story is, after all, always complicated.
