Dayna Kurtz

American singer-songwriter Dayna Kurtz visited the UK earlier this year to play a few dates to help promote her new album AMERICAN STANDARD. I caught up with Dayna for a quick chat before her gig in Bedford. One question I asked was whereabouts did she grow up. “I grew up on the Jersey shore, Springsteen land you know? I grew up like ten minutes from where he grew up, roughly the same kind of neighbourhood.” I also asked if music ran in her family? “Nobody in my immediate family was a musician. My maternal grandmother’s family, there were five sisters and all of them were musicians and my maternal great grandfather played violin on the streets for money, he was a fiddle player and classical violinist. My grandmother’s sisters, three out of the five of them played piano in silent movie houses. My grandmother was always a frustrated singer and when she got older she started singing professionally in Florida for the retirement community, you know she started doing small shows and stuff for people and she had a really beautiful voice. So, it was in the family, but I didn’t really grow up surrounded by musicians, but I kind of wished I did. Clearly genetically it was in there somewhere and just sort of skipped into me, and luckily saved up all that desire.”
It seems that Dayna’s grandmother was very influential in her transition to a musician and singer, but I also wondered about the music that Dayna listened to whilst growing up, as this normally helps to develop the skills and style of a singer-songwriter. “I was always kind of musical, there was my grandmother’s piano in my house and I picked out tunes by myself, so my mother was like: ‘wow what the hell is that about!’ She got me lessons, I didn’t really like piano lessons much, but I liked writing the songs on my own. Then I begged for a guitar when I was twelve and taught myself how to play, I wasn’t very good at being taught, I liked learning on my own … I had a good ear. The music that was around, I just think it’s kind of beneficial to a musician to be a youngest child because I wasn’t listening to teenybopper stuff, you know. My brother was listening to (Led) Zeppelin, Beatles, Rolling Stones and my sister was listening to Stevie Wonder, Jackson 5, Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens and stuff—so I had all these records when they went off to college. Basically that was my education (musically), my parents were big into show tunes, they loved Broadway, the golden era of Broadway soundtracks and cabaret music. I kinda got the gamut. I got a whole load of stuff out of it—so that was pretty cool.”