Shannon
Curfman is an old soul in a young person's body.
"Buddy and I were ... talking about that actually - Buddy Guy," Curfman said in a phone interview last week. "He was kind of making fun of me. ... He's like, ‘You know what? That's bullshit. ... You're 20 years old and you've already gone through this. It took me until I was almost 70 to realize half this stuff.'"
"This stuff" is the nearly inevitable souring of a major-label musician on the business of selling records. Many performers need decades of being exploited by big corporations before they realize there's a better way. Curfman, who is now 21 and will be performing this Saturday at the Redstone Room, figured it out in her teens.
Her debut album, Loud Guitars, Big Suspicions, was released by Arista in 1999, when she was 14.
And since then? A couple cuts on soundtrack albums, a guest appearance on a Keb' Mo' CD, and an EP that came out this summer. For somebody whose skills before she could drive were favorably compared to Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar-playing and Bonnie Raitt's singing, that's a long time to be off the streets. (For perspective, Britney Spears also debuted in 1999 and has released four proper albums, two babies, and a pair of improper husbands.)
After she left Arista, Curfman signed with Epic/Sony, but turmoil at the label put her on the shelf. "We were all kind of as lost as last year's Easter egg," she said. "We were all kind of in limbo. Considering I hadn't released anything since I was 14, I was pretty frustrated. I didn't want there to be five, six, seven years between albums. ... I figured when I was 20 years old - by now I'm 21 - I would have had three albums under my belt at least. The bummer for me is that I had the material, and I worked every day. ... I was in [the studio] every day for years."
The good news is that, freed from her corporate contracts, Curfman now has a wealth of material to put out on her own label, Purdy Records. "I have enough for a box set," she said. "I could release a box set for my next album."
But she's moving slowly. The blues-heavy style of her debut turned into a polished, aggressive attack on Take It Like a Man, which she put out on July 4. "It was a very relaxed release," she said. "It just happened to be a Tuesday. ... I didn't have anything to do until later that evening, so I'm like, ‘Ah, might as well just release the album.' ... It's just an EP. It's not a big deal."
What isn't relaxed is the sound. "Take It Like a Man is as rock as I'll ever get," she said. The tone of the record can be gleaned from the song titles: "Stone Cold Bitch," "Do Me," and "Sex Type Thing," for example.
As those names also indicate, it's not a mature record, but what do you expect from somebody who was promised great things and then got bottled up for a third of her life? There's joyful release on Take It Like a Man, and an attention to musical detail. If it's hard to gauge Curfman's songwriting at this point in her career, her ear for arrangement and her performance skill are undeniable.
What she doesn't want is to be pigeonholed. "I was under the understanding when I got signed [by Arista] that they were signing me because of what I do and not because I was someone that was capable of doing whatever they wanted to throw at me that week to try out," she said.
She knows that she could have been a pop star. "That's not what I wanted to do," she said, "and I didn't want to lie to people and pretend that I was into something that I wasn't. I could never imagine going on stage and playing songs for people that I don't enjoy. I feel that there's at least some of my fan base that trusts in me, and there's some sort of obligation as a musician to show people what you really are into."
She is guiding her own career not just artistically but from the business end, as well. "I don't know if I'm necessarily a control freak, but [with] all the stuff that happened when I was a teenager, I want to know ... where my money is; I want to know what shows are being booked and why the deals are how they are."
While that's a lot of work, she said, "it's a lot less stressful just knowing what's going on. ... I can just rest easier at night."
Plus, she said,"I love the business side of it."
A full-length record should be out next spring, building on some of the songs on the EP. She plans to go into the studio this winter to finish the tracks.
As you might imagine, a lot of really young musicians seek her out for guidance. "My advice is always to sit down and really take some time to decide whether you want to be in music or if you want to be in the music business, because they're two completely different things," Curfman said. "If you decide to be in the music business, and really all you want to do is play music ... you're going to be a miserable person, and you're going to get stuck. ... If just doing music is important to you, then stay in your basement and play music."
Those words come from experience. Curfman said she actually told her label when she was 15 that she was quitting: "I wanted to just be normal, I guess, and go to college, eventually get married and have kids and play for my babies. ...
"The whole reason I started playing and singing ... was just sucked out of me. ... Being a 15-year-old, as grown up as I was and mature as I was in a lot of ways, I didn't know how to handle ... feeling like someone had basically taken everything from me.
"I've learned to only trust myself with a lot of things, such as money," she said. "I learned what was important to me."
She started playing guitar at age nine or 10, she said, and never dreamed of what eventually transpired. "My goal when I was 11 was to save up enough money playing around Fargo [North Dakota] to be able to move to the Uptown area in Minneapolis by the time I was 18," she said, "and hopefully people would let me play around town in their coffee shops, you know, for tips."
That gentle dream was replaced by the reality of being chewed up and spit out.
Her debut was recorded and initially released independently. "We never tried to get into the music business, as far as getting signed," Curfman said. Her first record sold a few thousand copies in a few months, and "labels watch SoundScan, I guess," she said. "People were calling us."
Doing things herself certainly means that she's bypassing the stardom of, say, fellow Fargo native and teen phenom Jonny Lang, who appeared on her first album.
Curfman said she'll take the trade-off: "I don't want to make the game any harder for myself right now."
Shannon Curfman will perform on Saturday, November 18, at the Redstone Room. Tickets are $12, and the show starts at 9 p.m.
To listen to the River Cities' Reader interview with Shannon Curfman, visit (http://www.qcspan.com).
