Keira King

Keira King writes country songs on her own, starting from a hook and building a story around it.

SALTYmf took the Salty's Live Music setup to the Fernandina Beach Songwriters Festival, her second year on the bill, and caught her between sets. Brad's own account is that she saw the crew coming and hesitated, then sat down anyway. She spent most of her answers talking about everyone else at the festival, how many working musicians a beach town that size turns out and how far the locals go to look after each other.

She started with piano lessons in first grade and was not interested in them at all. What she wanted was to make something up, and she kept asking her teacher whether they could, so she ended up writing out the notes herself for the little jingles she invented. Then she found her mother's old guitar, wanted to learn it badly enough that her mother bought her one her own size for her birthday, and took lessons from there. Nobody else in her immediate family plays. Her sister did piano alongside her and went to sports instead. She graduated from Belmont in December. Her sound started nearer indie and folk and has settled into modern pop country with older country details tucked underneath. The songs are almost never true stories. A hook arrives out of a conversation or something on the radio, and she builds the rest around it. It is all storytelling to her, and the hook usually ends up being the title.

Home is Wisconsin. She was born in Illinois and moved halfway through high school, and that is the version that stuck. Her parents relocated near Fernandina Beach, which makes her what she calls a frequent visitor, or a prolonged one. She is planning shows back up in Wisconsin over the summer. She posts under Keira M King on everything, and she has not finished making the page pretty yet.