Musician Krista Detor Takes Flight

By Emily Thompson:

There are two types of people in this world: the screamers and the flappers. When a person jumps off a cliff, they can either scream on their way down or attempt to fly. This classification is what musician Krista Detor once discussed with a friend over a glass of wine. In trying to decide how she would categorize herself, Detor responded, “I thought about it, and I instantly thought I was a flapper. I’m somebody who is going to fight the tide. I’m not going gentle into that good night. And whether its going to help or not, I’m going to try to fly.”


Through the course of her life, Detor has resided in a range of places around the world. She was born in Los Angeles and lived there until she was eighteen. At the age of sixteen, she found her way into the world of music through working in the wedding circuit. From there, Detor earned a degree in classical piano performance at a college in Northern California. She married her current producer, Dave Weber, right out of college and spent a few years on a military base in Seoul, South Korea.


After years of immersing herself in various cultures around the world, Detor realized her heart belonged to the Midwest. Upon visiting her mother in Bloomington, Indiana, she decided to settle in the college town. “I was just passing through. I hadn’t stopped any place for longer than two years; I’d been kind of a gypsy,” Detor explains. “I suddenly felt like this was home. It’s a great place to tour from, and I tell people that all the time. If you look at the touring radius from Bloomington, within three hours, I’ve got Chicago and Cincinnati. If I go four hours, I’ve got St. Louis, Columbus, and Nashville. In six hours I’m in Memphis, and by the time I hit the twelve-hour mark, I’m in New York City.”


When Detor isn’t touring around the country, as well as in various parts of Europe, she is hard at work in the recording studio. But just like any other musician, she has had to fight the pressure to mold her music into what “the American market” wants. “My first album I just wrote. I wasn’t writing for a market, I wasn’t signed to anybody, and I wasn’t really touring. My second album I wrote for the market. After I was signed, I had tons of big European press. I’d been on national radio; my whole life had changed. I was trying to write for the Americana market, and it did not work out for me.”


So by the time Detor starting producing her third album, Chocolate Paper Suites, she was ready to set herself apart from other musicians. The album is composed of five suites of three songs each that intertwine to illustrate the album’s unifying themes. She says that her music “is not easily classified, and some people find that a frustrating quality. If you can’t fit well into a genre, some people don’t want to deal with it. It’s a curse and a blessing. But it’s more the individual song for me and the character of the song. So I tend to jump genre quite a bit because I feel like I want to find the genre that fits the song best. Its harder for me to fit into boxes.”


But it is the fact that Detor thinks outside of the box that made her a perfect candidate for the Darwin Song Project. The Darwin Song Project is a “songwriting retreat” in Shropshire, England, for which eight musicians were selected to participate. The goal of the project was to produce an album that celebrated the Bi-Centennial of Charles Darwin. Detor wrote and sang three songs for the project, which make up the last suite on Chocolate Paper Suites. Detor explains the Darwin suite: “The unifying themes are Charles Darwin, creationism versus evolution, the American landscape, and the love between Charles and Emma Darwin.”


Detor will be releasing Chocolate Paper Suites in the fall of this year. But in the meantime, she will be performing at the Irving Theatre in Indianapolis at 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 13. With an opening act from Tonos Triad, the show is sure to be nothing short of spectacular. And before the end of the night, Krista Detor will surely inspire the audience to release their inner flapper.


Listen to some of Krista's recordings here - http://www.myspace.com/kristadetor