Katell Keineg

Born in Brittany in 1965, alternative pop/rock singer-songwriter Katell Keineg grew up in Wales’s Rhymney Valley after her Breton-American poet father and Welsh political-activist mother steeped her childhood in both social engagement and the traditional folk repertoires of Brittany and Wales. Early choral singing gave way to discoveries of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles; at sixteen she began composing and busking in Cardiff, soon extending her performances across the U.K. and Ireland. She later based herself in Dublin to concentrate on original material, then moved to New York in 1992.

Her first recording, the 1993 7-inch “Hestia,” emerged as a brooding, atmospheric meditation on loss and renewal. That year she also supplied guest vocals for Iggy Pop’s “Mixin’ the Colors” on the album American Caesar; Pop subsequently recommended her to Elektra, resulting in the 1994 debut album Ô Seasons Ô Castles. Jet, her second full-length, appeared in 1997.

Following a period of withdrawal from recording, the death of close friend Jeff Buckley in 1997 prompted Keineg to perform at his memorial and, in 1999, at his birthday tribute concert, where she closed a set of traditional Celtic songs with Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You.” After departing Elektra and reclaiming the masters of her first two albums, she issued the EP What’s the Only Thing Worse Than the End of Time? on Field Recording Co. in 2002. High July followed in 2004 on Megaphone Music, accompanied by extensive touring. Solo travels through South America, Africa, and the Caribbean introduced fresh percussion, acoustic, and vocal approaches that shaped later work.

At the Mermaid Parade was released in 2010, prompting further international dates. In 2012 she issued the Welsh-language single “Platform 0.” An essay on Nina Simone appeared in the 2015 anthology Here She Comes Now: Women in Music Who Have Changed Our Lives. Two years afterward she joined Dutch composer and saxophonist Marike van Dijk and her forty-five-piece chamber ensemble for sessions that yielded an album released in early 2018 and supported by promotional shows. That summer she took part in Highway One, a live-music-and-theater hybrid she developed with her father, during Cardiff’s Festival of Voice.