The Kaki King Effect

She’s doing it all right. Kaki King has delivered good music to the masses. It’s a little bit experimental mixed with a little bit of radio-friendly. It’s nothing that you are supposed to like; she’s not being inflated like Gaga. It’s something that you happen upon and it draws you in.

Kaki King isn’t about flashy. She’s about music. And she understands it in both a musical sense as well as a commercial sense. That’s how you can hear her music on the radio (though not mainstream radio …more like Echoes or college stations) yet you can analyze what’s there and not be bored. There’s a healthy mix of the technical and the typical. On any record of hers you will find both some technically dazzling acoustic work as well as some accessible melodies and harmonies.

Her albums are a multi-faceted single entity, disguised in some manner to all. To those of us who seek musical excellence and complexity, that’s what we hear. Yet, at the same time someone who doesn’t know anything about music can appreciate and enjoy it as being similar enough to what they are already familiar with. She’s doing it all right.

So what exactly am I referring to when I say “The Kaki King Effect”? It’s how listening to her music makes you want to listen to more of her music …exclusively.

I noticed this sometime while driving this past weekend. Now my personal preference for listening to music is to listen to an entire album, start to finish. I rarely ever do shuffle or even an album out of order. It bothers me. After listening to the whole thing, I will find a different album to listen to.

In the case of this past weekend, I started by listening to Kaki King’s latest album, Junior. Afterwards, when it was time to choose the next album, I couldn’t think of anything that I cared at all to listen to. Scrolling through the vast music collection of my iPod, I just wanted more Kaki.

So then I listened to another one of her albums, and another. It was a one-track mindset perpetuated by itself; a phenomenon I would like to dub The Kaki King Effect.

Here's the first song I ever heard from Kaki King, Playing with Pink Noise. It's a little less accessible, but a good gateway.