By John Lee
Photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
Hair by Irene Kim, Ra Beauty Core
Makeup by Angela Yoon, Ra Beauty Core
A bow-and-arrow of a young woman with high-glee eyes, shrouded by a cowl of jet-black bangs, Priscilla Ahn perches center stage, cradling a guitar in the crook of her arm. She lets the instrument dangle comfortably by her side like a friend she grew up with and, by habit, feels at ease more with, than without.
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She attends to a keyboard, woos a mic stand, and as a synthetic cicada starts to buzz and pop, exudes a sound that seems purely electronic, yet somehow warm and natural in this hushed, but sold-out L.A. music hall on the final night of a six week-long, group tour that goes by the name of its origin, Hotel Cafe. With the countenance of having owned this moment all her life, it is as if absolutely anything might happen.
What takes place next might be described as an unfurling. A clear voice from a deep well and a fine line melody flutter from the microphone center stage, passing through speaker bins, and wending their way through the heights of the venerable El Rey Theatre. Filling with instrumental accompaniment and breath displacement, her vocals uncoil like a wind-swept bolt of fine sonic fabric, now echoing lustrously through a loop pedal, almost translucent as they shimmer, radiating outward, orbiting the chandeliersabove, gently reverberating and shaking the stilled house.
If there was any question, the audience seems to know now. This is Priscilla Ahn.
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A formidable raconteur of everyday life and a close observer of the minutely perceptible vibrations in our airwaves, Priscilla embarks this month on a journey that promises to reach new elevations as a recording artist for Blue Note Records. Her debut album, “A Good Day,” releases on June 10.
Little more than a month before the date, in a lull before a demi-onslaught of media requests gathers steam, Priscilla is still somewhat at a loss for what to expect with the airing of two of her singles on the elite playlists of KCRW, the influential National Public Radio affiliate station in Los Angeles, and the pending wide distribution reach of her new album.
With devastating levelheadedness, she discusses the prospects of the coming release, declaring with characteristic waggishness and understated charm, “I think it’ll be in stores and stuff!”
“I mean I can’t even imagine it, yet,” she says, seated outside a quirky gelato shop on the outskirts of Koreatown in Los Angeles, her home for the past five years. “I have a feeling when the album comes out I’ll be doing a lot of touring, so there’s a part of me that’s a little nervous about that. It seems so surreal to me, right now. I have no idea. I think it will be interesting and exciting and fun. But in the end, I’ll still want to have my time at home and my time to myself. That’s really important to me. Also my creative space, too. It’s really important to have time by myself, and freedom to just lay around the house all week, and then play my guitar and stuff. I need that.”
As unassuming and gentle as Priscilla might appear at first blush, make no mistake, she possesses abilities both innate and honed largely through self-training that can stun even the most grizzled wildebeast among us. At 24, already a road-tested, journeywoman folk musician and frequent aviatrix in a traditional American music-spun atmosphere for years, not only is she an enchanting vocal presence and natural born storyteller, but she marshals an at-once laidback and firm command of musical instrumentality.
Some of which include an Agents of Empire-nerdesque curiosity for the technical side of electronic equipment not readily associated with the folk genre, and an equally abiding affection for wallflower instruments — in addition to the acoustic guitar and piano — often overlooked on the pop music landscape: ukelele, banjo, glockenspiel (percussion bells), harmonica, and even kazoo.
Maybe even more than her consummate vocal qualities, it is Priscilla’s lack of pretense that people find most appealing. A disarmingly down-to-earth young lady with prima donna power on reserve, she makes easy conversation with just about anyone, more like a cool cousin, or a wiser, if not older, sister, who genuinely enjoys connecting with audiences on and off stage, effortlessly spinning droll asides during song interludes. (“Oh, you like that it’s a kazoo? It’s harder to play than you think!”)
Her storytelling and songs are rooted in the small details of everyday life; they are, at turns, tender, odd, sometimes slightly tarnished and appallingly funny. No subject is too personal, it would seem, and shyness and embarrassment appear to fuel her most telling portraits. Clearly, she is comfortable sharing her life through songwriting, performing, and starkly personal communiques with friends and fans.
A recent journal entry from Priscilla’s dedicated website, which launched in mid-April, serves as good example.
A NEW DISCOVERY
5.16.2008 12:00am
I had to take a trip to the doctor’s today. I’ve had seriously crippling stomach cramps yesterday and today. I’ve been eating charcoal pills, which actually help. But I thought I’d go to the doctor’s to just see what was up. At first he was baffled, until he asked me if I tend to get anxious. I don’t consider myself a high-anxiety person. However, I do get excited whenever I walk into a bookstore, or a movie rental place, or if I’m about to buy something online, do the crossword. I get so excited in these situations that I usually have to go to the bathroom, like clockwork. I thought everyone was like that. Until I learned today, that I have an emotional colon, aka an “irritable bowel.”
Not to get started on the allure of Priscilla’s physical appearance, but it is not enough to say she is comfortable in her own skin. As is with her singing and the way she understands the rests and spaces between notes, her praises are often as much for what doesn’t go in, than what does. At 5 feet, 8-and-a-half inches tall, she can go make-upless, dress spare and simply, be completely unbejeweled, and still steal attention from Hollywood’s lock-step glamouratti without batting an eyelash.
That she hasn’t changed herself to more resemble an L.A. scenester or to fit a current industry ideal, speaks to the gravity of her gifts, and is a sign that she is aware of their value. Maybe she hides her eyes behind a veil of bangs because of an unsettling laser power underneath, as even her laid back demeanor never seems to wander far from the source of that luminance, whetted, as it is, to be razor sharp.
Spending time and words harping on things as ephemeral and adverse to written pedantry as God given beauty and harkened heralds, perhaps it’s better to pay attention to the source. Where does a sound — song, music, art — come from?
“When I start writing a song, I’ll just start playing something on the guitar that inspires me all of a sudden, and whatever first words come out, I feel like they come out for a reason,” Priscilla says. “It’s maybe something I’ve been thinking about the past couple days, something just subconscious that I’m not even aware of, that I’m feeling right now, you know? I just let it come out, and sometimes it’s just, it doesn’t sound perfect but, then, after I sing it a hundred times, to learn the song, it is perfect. Just the way it is. To me. I really try not to make it [seem like] work at all. Because then I feel it’s forced and not coming from a genuine place.
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“I’m a woman trying to figure out who I am and become a better person. And do things I enjoy. Singing and writing just happen to be a very big part of that, though. But I pay just as much time to my gardenoutside, or reading, or doing my crossword. I just love to do all the things that make me happy.”
Literally, Priscilla hails from Bernville, a sleepy, rural town in southeastern Pennsylvania, born to Harry Hartranft and Kyeung Ae Ahn, a mechanic and former elementary school daycare governess, respectively. Mrs. Hartranft, who goes by Kay, immigrated in 1982 to the United States at age 22 from her native Ayang in North Gyeongsan province, South Korea. Priscilla’s brother, Jake, is 15.
For ease of pronunciation, Priscilla has performed for the past two years using her mother’s maiden name because of the general difficulty people have spelling and pronouncing the German surname, Hartranft (she says “Heart-raft” without the ‘n’ sound, although a German speaker once told her it might have originally sounded more like, “Heart-Ronft.”)
She credits her mom for her musical start, as Kay Hartranft sang regularly in choir and encouraged Priscilla to participate in a Christmastime recital.
“It was fun,” Priscilla recalls. “It was my first time singing in front of people, and I remember liking it a lot. I was 8 years old, and I was like, ‘I can sing! People like my voice!’“
Although her mother was her earliest inspiration, as Priscilla grew older, Kay seemed to show less interest in continuing with her own singing. About the same time, as Priscilla continued to enjoy writing songs and performing, she and her mother’s shared interests began to drift apart.
“She did it as a hobby, and she would sing in church,” Priscilla says. “That was sort of her thing, her moment to shine. Eventually she stopped singing and playing piano and stuff. She was the one who got me into both of those things, and then I sort of took over and she stopped.”
Although not sure exactly why, Priscilla says, they began to have less in common as she grew into her teen years.
“Her ideals were different. She was really strict. … She would take me clothing shopping and back then, I wasn’t into clothing shopping. I didn’t really want to do that, like getting her hair done. The kind of stuff that I’m into now, I didn’t like doing back then. I was more into fishing and playing catch with my dad. All that kinda stuff. Pretty much until I was older, like 18.”
By this time she had gone on from singing in school and church choirs, to playing at local music fairs, coffee shops, bars, and clubs around Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York City. Lighting out for bigger things, Priscilla moved to Los Angeles at age 19. After a rough start getting situated while chasing down open mic opportunities, she eventually became a regular at the seemly music venue, Hotel Cafe, where she met singer Joshua Radin, and was later invited to go on a nationwide tour, opening for and performing songs with him.
“A Voice Like a Banner Flying,” is the title of a Time magazine cover story published in January 1961 which chronicles opera diva Leontyne Price at a point in history coinciding with the Civil Rights movement, when metropolitan opera houses started seeing the possibility of African American performers gracing their hallowed stages.
Although their vocal sensibilities might be worlds apart, as stripped down and unadorned as Priscilla’s singing and songwriting seems, she and Price share a similar source. Which is to say, something of a larger, passing force that appears to channel through each, and is immediately recognizable to audiences, traveling via breath and voice, from guts, to lips, to ear and heart as it soars through open mics and concert halls into the heavens. Given Priscilla’s penchant for flight, the title seems, well, fitting.
(Neither here nor there: As far as operatic performance goes, however, Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez’s aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana,” from Catalani’s opera, “La Wally,” which plays a prominent role in the 1981 French film “Diva,” is, for at least one observer, nearer in vocal personality and atmospheric quality to Priscilla.)
Though her maiden recording voyage on Blue Note Records is, in so many ways, not a racial barrier breaking episode, it is, in the same vein, nonetheless groundbreaking and noteworthy as Priscilla is among a handful of musical artists outside of straight-ahead jazz to be included on the roster of one of the most iconic record companies in American music.
That the Blue Note label has a reputation for nurturing and sustaining creativity, and revolves less around the business of hit making, makes Priscilla’s debut there all the more auspicious — a testament to her standing in the continuum of music that the label has been instrumental in developing, a homegrown, intrinsically American musical tradition.
After a dormant stretch in the late-‘70s to mid-‘80s, Blue Note went on to achieve commercial success, most notably with Norah Jones, who was signed to the label in 2001. Blue Note has also released new works by artists on the fringes of jazz such as Van Morrison, Al Green, and young, folk-bluesman Amos Lee, a musical friend of Priscilla’s from Philadelphia, who indirectly had a hand in introducing her to the label, and is at times, unimaginatively referred to as “the male Norah Jones.” Indeed, a blogger on Vanity Fair’s website, declared Priscilla Ahn, “the new Norah Jones,” after noting similarities in their circumstance at a May concert at the Living Room in New York City.
Having a label to call home for her career, and not just a record album deal, was an important deciding factor for Priscilla and the Blue Note family. Which speaks to at least one of the extrasensory powers Priscilla has at her disposal: an ability to cut reality whole cloth from dreams.
“It was pretty awesome when I heard that Blue Note wanted to sign me,” she says while taping a behind-the-scenes look at her life during the recording of “A Good Day.” “Because, for the past I don’t know how many years, I guess since I’ve lived in L.A., I always said to myself if I’m going to sign a record deal with anyone, I would choose Blue Note. Because I like their artists and I believe in how they make records. I just think they do things differently from any other record label. Anyway, I was just super excited about it. I think I sort of manifested it, because I thought about it a lot.”
The past few months found Priscilla swept in a whirlwind-like schedule of performances, interviews and promotion for “A Good Day.” In April, she wrapped the omnibus Hotel Cafe tour playing four dates (New York City, Boston, Ithaca, Pittsburgh) on the east coast leg of the self-described “folk ‘n’ roll” bus tour, as well as the final two concerts in Los Angeles during which she played, as yet, unrecorded songs (the startling, kazoo razzed-up “boob song” has been a hit with audiences), and tracks from both an independent self-titled EP recorded in 2006, and the new album.
“A Good Day” is a collection of 11 songs and collaborations with friends and professional acquaintances made on the road to the present. Produced by Joey Waronker, who Priscilla deems “one of the raddest drummers around,” and who worked with her on the earlier EP, is part of an informal family of musicians who had a hand in the making of the album. They are Gus Seyffert, Greg Kurstin, Keefus Ciancia, Mike Andrews, Zac Rae, Larry Goldings, Oli Krauss, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Ursula Knudsen, Vanessa Freebarn-Smith, John Kirby, and “the heavenly voices” belonging to Jim Gilstrap and Orin Waters.
Solo dates and events in support of the album have started to stack up on both coasts and inbetween, including gigs in New York, L.A. and Nashville. Her first single, “Dream,” from the new album, is featured in a pivotal scene in the season finale of “Grey’s Anatomy.” And on June 11, she earns musical guest status on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
We asked the question: Have you thought about the coverage you’ll be receiving?
“I don’t think I’ve thought about it too much. In general, I hope to give off some kind of persona that I’m nice. Sometimes I’m afraid that won’t come through. And it’s my own head-stuff. I get into my head that maybe something will come out wrong, and they’ll take it the wrong way, and write it out in this article, and be like, ‘She’s such a conceited girl,’ or something, and, that … I’d be so mortified.”
“But I guess that, I don’t know, that I’m sorta, just a normal person about what I do as an artist. I feel like sometimes you read articles about an artist, and they’re such, like, an artist. They’re their own thing, and everything is about them, and they’re going to conquer the world, sort of thing. I don’t really take that approach, I guess. I just feel like a normal person. And I like to write songs. And I hope that other people will like them. If they don’t, that’s totally cool, too.”
As she thinks about it for a moment, she realizes her goals since she started playing music way back when haven’t really changed.
“If I could just be able to do what I do right now,” she says, looking past a half-melted lychee and corona gelato, into the street, beyond a construction site, “which is sing, and play, and play shows, and have the lifestyle I have right now, which is a pretty quiet lifestyle, I’d be really happy. I’d be content for the rest of my life, I think.“
Listening to Priscilla, you begin to understand how music involves the whole of her life. She is indivisible like that. And similarly, anything you want to know about her, you will find out when you meet her. Trust. See and hear her.
