Kristeen Young: growing up in a religious home, she lived by the rules.
Now this glam-rock chanteuse has made an album about breaking the bible's
top ten
One night last year, Kristeen Young was holed up in a sweltering, humid
apartment in Lisbon, Portugal, when she was struck by an idea of biblical
proportions: For her latest album, X (TVPI), she would craft a cycle of
songs based on the Ten Commandments, outlining reasons to break each and
every one. "Maybe I was hallucinating, because this idea just popped into
my head," says the 29-year-old singer-songwriter. "1 had a couple of
songs, and then I sat down and wrote the rest of the record really fast."
Religion has been a long-running theme in Young's life. Born and raised in
St. Louis, she was adopted by fundamentalist Christian parents, who
closely monitored her activities. "My mom didn't even allow me to be a
Brownie--she said they were too worldly," explains Young. "So music was my
refuge." Piano and voice lessons led her first to a high school for the
performing arts and then to Webster University, where she studied music.
Following graduation, Young packed up for the New York City area, where
she played a series of small gigs at clubs like CBGB and hooked up with
producer Tony Visconti (of David Bowie and T. Rex fame) after randomly
picking his name out of a music-industry directory. "I saw that he worked
with Bowie, and I knew that a lot of people who came to my shows loved
Bowie," recalls Young. "So I wrote Tony a letter and sent a CD of demos
without knowing who he was." The result of their collaboration, X, is an
old-fashioned glam-rock concept album, on which Young, in her sensual,
elastic voice, delivers tales of deceit, murder, and infidelity with
punkish abandon. "I used to consciously avoid the topic of religion
because I thought that it had been overdone," Young says of the album's
overriding motifs of faith and sin. "But we've torn down a lot of these
rules and principles in our culture and haven't replaced them. We live in
a very reasonable era where, if you look hard enough, you can find an
excuse to do anything. The album is less about what's good or bad, and
more about what just is."
