Kim Taylor

So it's the right time to get personal. I'll tell you a few things about myself. I was born in Miami, Florida and my house was five minutes from the Atlantic Ocean. I'm an only kid and I grew up in the country. I learned to swim around 3 and took my first piano lessons with a strange smelling old woman when i was 6. It didn't last long cause I got bored with learning Froggy Goes A Courtin. I longed for the Guiding Light theme songs. Mom let me quit after a couple of years. I played flute in junior high. I was second seat. I was in marching band. I won a poetry contest at my school in the 7th grade. I was a dancer in high school and then I was a cheerleader. I kept on with the piano and took classical lessons with a Seventh Day Adventist. I started playing guitar when I was 18. I was an ok singer. Decent enough at harmonies. I took voice lessons with a guy who had done a lot of coaching with great Christian singers and he encouraged me not to attempt to major in voice. I think that would actually be called DIScouraging. Dare I say fuck him? To make a long story short and to skip out on years of moving around Florida and working lots of jobs and dropping out of lots of colleges (i was a restless english major), I ended up in Cincinnati 10 or so years ago. I went north to be a short story writer. Like Eudora Welty. This is still my very near future plan. But right now I write songs. In 2002 I released my very first record. I called it So Black, So Bright because that phrase sounded nice. I was trying to describe how the darkness that I was feeling at the time also had a glimmer of hope. Of light. I lost my grandfather and my great-grandmother that same year. My granny had been a farmer all her life. My papa had been a phosphate miner. I miss them both. Some people in Cincinnati liked that record and I got an award for New Artist of the Year. It's made of clay and it's cool and it's sitting nicely on my piano. I lean important books against it. I started a band in 2003, got my first invitation to SXSW in 2005 and well, there's been a lot of great stuff since. My proudest memories so far are 1. a year on the road with Over the Rhine in 2005 opening and background vocalist-ing, 2. a month on the road with Ron Sexsmith in 2007 with Ben Sollee by my side, 3. opening for great songwriters like Kasey Chambers, Grant Lee Phillips, Grace Potter, Amy Rigby, Andrew Bird . . . Josh Ritter . . . I've been really really lucky. If it stopped tomorrow I'd be grateful that I got this far. That I had your ear for even a little while. So far, I've put out two full-length records and 2 eps. I won three more Cincinnati awards (one is clay and two are not but they're cool too) and my last full-length (Fading Light) was just released on vinyl thanks to producer Jimi Zhivago and to the great Greg Calbi and Experience Vinyl. Did I mention luck? There is a lot of luck in all of this. What I'm trying to say is that I don't really know how I've gotten here. I did not grow up in a musical family. I had a quiet childhood filled with whippoorwills and suntan oil. But I am a dreamer and all I really ever wanted was to be myself. Somehow myself led me to write and sing. Robert Frost once said that writing was a "stay from confusion" for him and this is very much true for me as well. If you've come here to be a fan of what I do, well, bless your heart. Did I mention I love dogs? January 7, 2009 Cincinnati, Ohio --kim taylor (from facebook.com)