Now based in New Orleans, Dayna Kurtz will return to New Jersey for show in Montclair

DAYNA KURTZ

On Oct. 24, 2024, Dayna Kurtz performed at Fletcher’s Listening Room at The Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair. After the show, she posted, to YouTube (watch below), a video of her performance, that night, of her anthem of defiance, “Don’t Tread on Me.” In it, she describes herself as coming from “The 201” (i.e., Northern New Jersey), so I assumed that it was an older song. Though she has spent most of her life in New Jersey, she has lived in New Orleans for more than a decade. But she says it was new, at that time; she just still thinks of herself as a New Jerseyan.

The stylistically versatile, deep- and soulful-voiced singer-songwriter-guitarist will return to Fletcher’s Listening Room on Oct. 11. As in 2024, she and guitarist Robert Maché will perform as a duo. The two also perform together in the band Lulu & the Broadsides (Kurtz is Lulu), who specialize in rowdy blues-rock songs and torchy ballads, and perform mostly in New Orleans, though they have toured occasionally.

I talked to her by phone, this week, about “Don’t Tread on Me,” the state of the country, Fletcher’s Listening Room, the upcoming 25th anniversary edition of her Postcards From Downtown album, and more.

Q: Hi, how are things?

A: You know, all things considering, I’m doing great. It’s sort of like 2025 is on a curve (laughs).

Q: That is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, because you do an interesting thing: I’m on Facebook a lot, as you are, and I’ve noticed you have an account for your music career, and then another account where you do political stuff. I do it all together and I’m thinking your way may be better.

A: Yeah, I wish I spent more time on my musical account. I can barely remember to put up gigs, you know what I mean? I think it started because you’re allowed to have more followers on a music account than you are on a real-person account. I wanted somewhere to send people when I hit the limit on my friend account, so I was like, “I might as well do an official page,” and that way people get notices for gigs. But honestly it turned out that the regular page wound up being, quote-unquote career-wise, a better move. The reach I have talking about politics is wider.

I always think about leaving Facebook, for a million reasons. There’s a million great reasons to not be on that kind of platform at this juncture in history, especially if one is mouthy, but it would be a legit hurt to my career (to leave it). I would say that most of my communication with fans happens there. I mean, it might be because of my age, or whatever. I’m just not hip enough for TikTok (laughs).

DAYNA KURTZ

Q: Which has its own reasons to stay away from it, too.

A: Yeah. Now? Oh my God. They have all the information they really need about us. But I figured … when people tell me I’m brave for being so opinionated, out loud, I’m like, “I’m not brave at all.” I just don’t have a day job. You know, I can’t be fired for my opinions, until they’re locking up old Jewish broads for being mouthy.

Q: Some people would argue that maybe you’re turning some people off who are potential fans who don’t agree with you politically.

A: A lot of my music has gotten kind of political. Back in the day, I think, I had more fans that were conservative. Not very many, but there were, because I played in honkytonks and stuff down South. But the handful that were hardcore fans that kind of followed me to Facebook and left … it’s not enough to affect me, really.

I think there’s a handful of quiet conservatives who are fans of mine. I think there’s a kind of dissembling that happens with a lot of those folks. I don’t think they’d listen to any of the music that they love if they thought too hard about anybody’s politics.

Q: Or they can just kind of separate that in their minds.

A: Yeah. My mother-in-law is a fundamentalist, megachurch Christian conservative. A very sweet woman. She’s not outwardly mean or Trumpy, but she definitely voted for him. And I have a gospel song that talks about how Jesus never talked about abortion, and she has never really listened to the words. She just likes that I’m singing about Jesus.

Q: I also wanted to talk about the song “Don’t Tread on Me.” I’ve seen the video you posted on YouTube. Is that an older song?

A: No, that’s a new song.

Q: I thought it might be old because you refer to yourself as coming from The 201, and you haven’t lived here in quite a while.

A: Quite a long time, yeah. But I’m a Jersey girl, born and raised.

I had a big writer’s-block kind of freeze during quarantine: The writers I know either got busy and had a tremendous output, or they froze. I don’t know many songwriters who just wrote as normal during quarantine. We were off the road and all of a sudden we’re like, “What the fuck?” (laughs) Everyone had a different response, depending on how they manage their own anxiety. I froze up. And that was the first song that came out. Like after three years or something.

Q: All that political anger just came pouring out.

A: I was basically, “OK, I guess I’m really pissed off.”

Dayna Kurtz and Robert Maché at Fletcher’s Listening Room in Montclair in October 2024.

Q: That was recorded at Fletcher’s Listening Room, and now you’re coming there again. Do you remember anything about that show or that venue?

A: Yeah, I love that venue. There’s a lot of UU church coffeehouse gigs, you know what I mean? The Unitarians have been very kind to folksingers, over the years. But they (Fletcher’s Listening Room) actually have an area with a stage and they turned it into a proper venue, and they’re kind of going for it. They’ve got great sound and lights and … it’s not a bar, but they sell snacks and stuff like that. It’s a real room. It’s not a church basement.

And that church has the coolest Unitarian revs ever: Scott and Anya (Sammler-Michael). They’re a couple. They’re so lovely.

Q: It will be a duo show with Robert Maché. Can you tell me about your history with him: how you met him and started working with him and stuff like that?

A: When I first started falling in love with New Orleans and visiting there a fair amount, and booking gigs, I met him at an early gig that I did — a benefit for The New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic. He was playing with The Continental Drifters, and I fell in love with that band. And we just became friendly. He had a spare room, and he and his wife Candace always put up musicians when they came to town. Somebody has a spare room in New Orleans, you wind up seeing them a lot (laughs).

So we wound up being good friends, but I thought of him as a rock ‘n’ roll guy. I knew he was a great guitar player, but … I never wanted to have another guitar player with me. If I played as a duo, I wanted to have like a keyboard player. But he moved up to Memphis after Katrina, and he and his wife hosted a house concert for me, and I invited them to play with me, and it was magic. He’s a phenomenal sideman. He’s just elegant and quietly supportive, and when you want him to shine, he blows your mind.

He became like the great gift of the latter half of my career. And he’s such a road dog: There are some people who are just born to tour, and he’s one of them. He’s way happier on the road than sitting still. He loves to travel and he’s always even-keeled and funny. He’s a joy to tour with, on every level. I get really sad when I have to play alone now.

The cover of Lulu & the Broadsides’ self-titled 2022 album. Robert Maché is at top left.

Q: And he plays in Lulu & the Broadsides too, right?

A: Yeah, we co-founded the band together.

Q: Are you kind of alternating solo stuff and band stuff at this point, with your tours?

A: When I’m in New Orleans, the Broadsides take precedence, just because we have a nice fan base. And I have a New York version of the band that’s three-fifths of the New Orleans band and two guys I hire in New York, so I could do festivals and stuff up here without a whole lot of agita. Also, James Singleton is my bass player in the New Orleans band, and he’s kind of a legend and he’s in his 70s, and he doesn’t tour unless you pay him a gazillion dollars. That the thing about New Orleans: Great players can actually make a living staying in one place, unlike New York now, unless they’re in an orchestra pit or doing something kind of boring. So, most of my touring is done as a duo. Very occasionally I’ll do a small run with the band.

Q: Do you have any recording plans, either with the band or solo?

A: Yeah, I’ve started the next record. I didn’t know what it was gonna be, so I just started recording and kind of serving the songs with what they demanded as songs. I think it’s going to be a Dayna Kurtz record that has the Broadsides accompanying me on a couple of songs, and they’ll be added to our set as a band. I haven’t put out a record of originals under my own name in quite a while.

Q: Do you have any idea when that will come out?

A: I am hoping it will be ready by this time next year. And we’re putting out … it’s the 25th anniversary of Postcards From Downtown, my first studio record, and we remixed and remastered that for vinyl. We found lost Richie Havens vocals and extended a song to accommodate them, and it sounds really good.

It was the only record I made digitally, because it was when Randy (Crafton) hadn’t really quite founded his studio, Kaleidoscope (in Union City). He was just making records in his basement. I wanted to make this big, warm record like the records I grew up listening to and heard in my head, and at that time in digital recording technology, it hadn’t quite gotten there. Now you can make a digital record that sounds like it was made to tape, but then you really couldn’t as easily.

So Randy went through every track and cleaned them up and remixed them and, like, dumped each track into tape to warm it up and then dumped it back into Pro Tools. He also knows a lot more about mixing than he used to. So it just sounds really good. I was kind of shocked: the difference when you A/B it, listening back between the original and the remixes and remasters. I’m so excited about it.

The cover of Dayna Kurtz’s “Postcards From Downtown” album.

Q: And it’s just going to be just vinyl?

A: I’m probably going to put out a CD as well. A lot of my fans are my age or older. They’re in their 60s. Some, 70s. And a lot of them gave away their records and their record player in the ’80s or ’90s and are like, “I’m not going back, God damn it” (laughs). They may stream, but a lot of them still like CDs. So I’m probably going to have to always make CDs for them, even though there’s no CD players in cars or laptops anymore, which is very annoying to me.

Q: Honestly, at this point, I almost exclusively just stream. I don’t even have a CD player or a vinyl player. I find streaming is enough: Virtually everything I would want to listen to is available in some form. And I’ve never been a real audiophile.

A: Yeah, I utilize streaming a lot. It’s made my life really difficult, to be honest. The music industry is dead. I don’t know how kids like me, who didn’t come from wealthy families, are going to do what I did. You could kind of live on 7 to 10,000 fans, when I was young. Because almost everybody would buy a record, in some form or another. And now (with streaming), you need millions of fans to make a living. My publishing income varied, of course, from quarter to quarter and year to year, depending on whether I had a new record out or whether a record got added to radio, or whatever. But I used to make a pretty steady high four figures, into like $20,000 or $25,000 on a great year, in publishing money every year, and that’s now a few hundreds dollars a year.

Universal basic income is the only way I could see a young musician from not a wealthy family making it, as somebody with not a huge following. Which is really sad to me, because not everybody is supposed to be a big artist. The misses are often as important or more important than the hits. The Velvet Underground influenced a million bands, but they did not sell a lot of records. Or, you know, whatever: Without Slim Harpo, there isn’t Mick Jagger, and Slim Harpo maybe sold 50,000 records in his lifetime.

It’s not good for music, what’s happening now. There’s a lot of it being made, and if you’re a kid and you know how to make it in your living room, and you have a day job, that’s one thing. But as somebody who puts a lot of energy and money into my recordings … there’s a bit of, “Why the hell do you make a record if it’s gonna take you 20 years to recoup on streaming?” I used to recoup in one year of touring, and then everything after that was me saving up money to make the next record. It sort of had a rhythm to it.

Please mention my Patreon, because that is keeping me alive! (Note: it is at patreon.com/daynakurtz). It hasn’t completely replaced my pre-streaming publishing income, but it’s getting closer, and it’s really helpful. I tell everybody at every show … like you would a movie-streaming thing: set aside $10 a month to give five artists that you love, $2 a month. It’s keeping my lights on. I would have quit without Patreon, to be honest.

DAYNA KURTZ

Q: So this new record … are you self-releasing it, or do you have a label?

A: I am self-releasing it. I have my own label. All of my records have been self-released. I sometimes have a distribution deal with a label, but I don’t in America anymore. In Europe, I do.

The bottom fell out of the indie record label business, too. It’s sad. Artist development is dead. I feel so bad for the young versions of me. I was making enough to live on, right away, selling cassettes out of my trunk. It wasn’t a big living: At my height, I was making like a mid-career elementary school teacher’s income. But I didn’t want anything more. I just wanted to pay my bills.

I’m sure it’ll all shake itself out. Artists will always want to make great music. But it makes me sad that somebody’s going to have to work a job that they find soul-sucking because art doesn’t pay at all.

Q: As you’re talking about this, I’m thinking about journalism, because journalism is basically the same way. When I was starting out, in the ’80s, you could find a job in journalism that … you wouldn’t get rich from it, but it would support you. And those jobs hardly exist anymore. And so young people are just not going into journalism because, I mean, why would you? Unless you’re really driven. And journalists my age have either gone to other professions or, like, in my case, I’m trying to make a living from this website. That’s not easy, and certainly not lucrative.

A: My husband’s a Hollywood prop maker. He’s a carpenter. And Hollywood, too … it’s like the shit-ification of everything, the Uber-ization of everything. Spotify is, like, you know, a handful of guys at the top, on the board — you know, the shareholders — making all of the money off of people who are hustling their asses off and making less and less. And it’s like, how long can a writer expect to hustle like that? It’s just not sustainable or right, even.

And it’s across the board. I think artists are just the canary in the coal mine. The artists and writers … we’re the first to go, but, you know, they’re doing it to teachers. Teaching used to be a great gig, and they’re just kind of squeezing everybody dry to make a handful of people wealthy.

So the middle class got squeezed out of music and journalism. You know, there’s a few rock stars, and then there’s everybody else, not being able to live. And I don’t think it’s good for art. I don’t think it’s good for the public information supply, that there’s no journalistic requirements for half of the news going out. There’s no real serious oversight or ethical concerns.

DAYNA KURTZ

Q: If you look a what’s on Facebook, now … a lot of it now is just false stuff …

A: AI slop.

Q: … that’s there just to get hits.

A: Yeah it’s clickbait. It’s pretty dire. And I don’t see a way out without universal basic income. Universal basic income and universal healthcare would make the lives and mental health of every artist I know better, overnight.

There’s a New Orleans term called lagniappe — a little extra. If any gigs I did were lagniappe on top of my basic income that was covering my nut, I would be so much less stressed out (laughs). There’s very little in the way of our societal problems that couldn’t be solved with a large influx of money for most people. That’s where so much of our insecurity and anxiety is coming from: Everybody’s working harder and harder for less and less. And whenever I go to a place where people are better taken care of, everybody just seems so much happier. You know, there’s a a selfish component to social programs: I think we could do a better job of selling to conservatives, because when your neighbor isn’t desperate, your life is better.

Q: There’s less crime, less illness and all these things. All the secondary effects. But it’s not gonna happen anytime soon.

A: No, nobody’s gonna let me be dictator. But we can wish.

It’s scary out there, ain’t it?

This is depressing. “I’m not gonna go see that Dayna person. She’s no fun.”

Q: But your shows aren’t depressing.

A: No they aren’t, actually. I make people sing a lot. That’s been my response to fascism, actually: I never wrote so many singalongs in my life.

Part of that is living in New Orleans, where call-and-response is very much part of the culture. People do sing along and dance. They’re very participatory and they love that. But part of it is also realizing how much people need to sing and how much their faces change after they’ve sung. Young people do it: They scream along to every Chappell Roan song at the concert. But people our age stopped doing that; we decided it was corny or something. And if you don’t go to church and you don’t belong to a choir … a lot of adults go through their lives not singing. And it’s shown to be as valuable as meditation in terms of stimulating your vagus nerve and calming your fear response.

I feel like it’s good medicine. So I’ve been doing that a lot. Ever since quarantine I’ve been making people sing along with me.

Dayna Kurtz and Robert Maché will perform at Fletcher’s Listening Room at The Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair, Oct. 11 at 7:30 p.m. Visit uumontclair.org/listeningroom.

For more on Kurtz, visit daynakurtz.com.

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