Calgary keyboardist Kara Keith (second from right) relaxes with her new backing band, Jeff Sulima (l), Sarah Nordean and Jordan Tettenson

Being a true artist is never easy, especially in an oil-money dominated, right-wing city like Cowtown. It’s even more difficult, it might be argued, in an old boy-dominated, wing-nut environment like that of indie pop and rock music. For Calgary’s Kara Keith, comfortably defining herself with the “A word” is a relatively recent development.
    “It’s taken me a long time,” she says. “I’ve always been self-deprecating and embarrassed. I’ll do something, and I’ll want to hide. ‘Artist’ is so vague, and anybody can say they’re an artist, and so I was always cynical about it. Really, you’re just emoting. You’re just trying to survive. That’s how I feel — like the world is crazy. It’s so ridiculous. I think most things are ridiculous, so to get by day to day, I have the refuge of making a melody or painting a picture or whatever it may be. When you realize you’re an artist, it’s really liberating.”
    Keith is a compelling individual, poised and profound one moment, giddy and fidgeting the next. “I’m outspoken, I’m loud and I don’t give a fuck,” she says. But she’s also charming, self-effacing, highly intelligent and pretty darn sexy. Keith wears her inherent contradictions like an eccentric thrift store ensemble. In an individual context, these contradictions make perfect sense. (For the record, for this interview, she’s wearing a simple, one-piece blue dress.) More than anything else, she comes across as someone who is finally, completely comfortable just being herself. “As I’m getting older, everything’s becoming much easier and much more fun. In your 20s it’s a battle,” she concedes. “Nobody pays attention to you as much when you’re 30 as they did. Not in the same way. I’m really grateful for that, because it’s quiet and you can just work and do stuff.”
    Keith’s musical odyssey is well-known to local music fans. Her classical music background, with its inherent discipline, gave her a rather different perspective from that of most independent musicians. “I was planning to become a concert pianist at one point,” she says, “and I just had practised myself into severe tendonitis, so I had no other choice but to kind of go downtown and find some other musicians. I was kind of sick of the stuffed shirts, anyway.”
    At 18, she found herself acting foil to the infamous Bobby Torpedo in a band called The Betrayers. “He was my start in the whole game. He would yell at me and go ‘Just play the A! Just play the A!’ and I would be trying to Bach it up. I had to unlearn everything I’d learned at the conservatory, to start to listen and approach music differently.” Still, she remembers those early ventures fondly. “He was completely abusive and hilarious at the same time,” she says of Torpedo, laughing heartily. “He’s awesome. I really like that guy.”
    Earthquake Pills came a couple of steps up the ladder of Keith’s evolving career. “I was 20 years old and I got drafted by Chris Temple from Wagbeard, and I was so excited.” Keith recalls. “It was arty and Chris was bored with the snowboarding music he was making and he wanted to be more artistic, so it was a really good marriage of goals and values.”
    Performing with the Pills opened Keith up to a new world of possibilities and confidence. She even started singing a little. Eventually, she realized that to achieve her own goals, she would need to form her own band. “We worked really well together, I just got to a point where I didn’t like writing songs and having him (Temple) sing them,” she says. “It just felt wrong. I felt a little like I was already in an institution, like these boys were from around the block. There was no sense of helping me become more prominent as an artist, only because they were already on their track and I was a support.”
    Keith then shanghaied Earthquake Pills’ bass player, Steve Elaschuk, drafted drummer and producer Dave Alcock and formed Falconhawk. The power trio would share three compact discs, a couple of tours, numerous club gigs, a Zed TV appearance and a nasty bus accident that saw them stuck on the side of the highway, bleeding in 46 C Arizona heat. That’s a long way from the conservatory.
    Back in Calgary, in the present tense, Keith has stripped away her band, image and any lingering pretensions, finally content just to be herself. Several years ago, she said she didn’t like her name because Kara Keith sounded like parakeet. “And now I love it, because of the same reason,” she says, laughing. “It totally is learning to live in your own skin. I finally realized that I don’t have to keep changing my name every two years. I was always running away, writing songs, starting a band, breaking it up, starting one up again.”
    This time out, Keith gives her fans an eponymous, five-song EP backed by a rhythm section of bassist Andy MacDonald (Fake Cops) and drummer Eric Hamelin (Chad Van Gaalen), with Anna Horiban on trumpet and Jordan Tettensor (another Fake Cop) on guitar. The piano, increasingly prominent on Falconhawk’s subsequent discs, is now front and centre. Keith’s Royal Conservatory piano students sing sweet harmonies. Keith’s own voice is low and sultry, again reflecting her increased self-confidence. The songs are moody, melodic and metaphorical. “All of them are about fighting and all of them are about just trying to survive.” She explains. “I always feel like I’m having fun and everything’s light, but underneath it all, I just see all the bad shit everywhere.” The EP’s closer, “Knosses,” turns an Erik Satie piano piece into a haunting cabaret number. In spite of all the “bad shit everywhere” the overall mood is one of guarded optimism. Keith agrees: “I’m a consummate optimist,” she says. “Even in my most depressed states, I have always been an optimist. I could even be suicidal and an optimist.” This struggle is integral to Keith’s artistic personae and process. “Most evolution happens because you’re constantly fighting with something and then you move forward. It’s kind of nice now, because what I’m fighting against isn’t as superficial as it was before. What I’m fighting against is my own personal goal for just trying to dig something good up.”
    One week after the release party, Keith will leave the prairies for a three-month mountain residency at Alberta’s premier institution of creativity, The Banff Centre. “It’s crazy,” she says excitedly. “It’s a nine-foot grand piano in a cabin in the woods. I’m alongside what’s-his-face who’s going to start his world tour at Carnegie Hall, and he’s just there to practice. I can’t wait to go and be undistracted and work on my craft.”