Zoë Keating

It’s winter break here in Vermont so my son and I have been out on the slopes every day. For many years I have stayed away from fast slidey sports because I was afraid of injuring my hands. If my hands don’t work, how do I make music? But among the many bits of advice I’ve gotten in my parenting journey, “be into what your kid is into” has been one of the best. My lad needed someone to ride the lifts with and I needed to overcome my fear and learn how to fall properly, so here I am.

I found that skiing is not all that different from rollerblading, which I learned to do in Central Park the summer of my junior year. I brought the skates with me on my year abroad in Florence. On weekends there was this amazing city to explore but buses and museums and cafes cost money. And whenever I roamed the quiet streets and parks alone, I would be perpetually harassed, groped and even flashed by pathetic men. But rollerblading was free and, bonus, I am already quite tall, so with skates I was at least 6ft2in. No one ever messed with me on skates. I adapted to the cobblestones and explored all of Florence with exhilarating freedom.

One Sunday, as I was enjoying the expanses of asphalt in Parco delle Cascine, I came upon a group of folks on old-school rollerskates. They had a boombox and were dancing, just like the skaters of Central Park but without the sequined hot pants. They waved me over and exclaimed over my weird skates. They invited me to join them and for the rest of the school year, I spent every Sunday afternoon I could with the rollerskaters. We would gather, dancing and skating around obstacles, and once we had critical mass, tear off along the Arno and into the old city. We’d skate past the David, circle the Piazza della Signoria multiple times and whizz down the marble collanade along the Piazza Republica, ending in a bar, still on skates, for an espresso or aperativo. Those are some of my best memories of my year in Florence.

I continued the skating when I moved to San Francisco, zooming most days through Golden Gate Park to the beach and back again. Sometimes I’d join a similar group of mad skaters on Friday nights to roll fearlessly down hills and through tunnels. Skating was always a great source of joy. But then I moved away from the paved environment of the city and I transitioned to music full time. After acquiring a broken finger from an Evil Door and being shocked at how much that tiny injury impacted my ability to play, I quit skating.

Fast forward to Vermont. Like many people did during the pandemic, I got back on skates except this time with padding, wrist guards and a helmet. And then, as my boy learned to snowboard, I learned to ski. We still ride the lifts together but now he zips down black diamond trails while I ski carefully down the easy ones. He is mystified as to how I can bear to do the same runs over and over but I like it that way. It’s like a meditation. I focus on perfecting my technique and try to make each turn better than the last. It feels similar to one of the things I enjoy about playing the cello, which is noticing tiny details and gradually polishing them. How can I improve this one phrase that I have played thousands of times? It never gets old or boring for me.

I hope it never gets boring for you either! Next week I’ll get back to work improving my old songs and figuring out to play some of my new ones in time for my concerts in March.

March 15 - ArtYard in Frenchtown,NJ

March 16 - Underground Arts in Philadelphia, PA opening up for my old friend The Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

March 17 - Le Poisson Rouge in NYC

March 21 - St John’s Cathedral at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN

And one more

April 6 - Unitarian Univeralist Church in Burlington VT, accompanied by mesmerizing visuals by Alex Reeves

also, outside my solo work on April 7 I’ll be a part of composer Randal Pierce’s ensemble, performing his live soundtrack to George Méliès’ silent cinematic masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon

6:30 and 8:30pm shows

More about all the events happening in Burlington around the eclipse

Thank you for listening and please wear a helmet when you are going fast.

Happy 2024 to you, in all its weirdness. 

I’m working on NEW MUSIC and will be sharing little bits of it and my process with you as I go along. For now, I’m putting the videos on Instagram and my Facebook Page and will link to them on my blog (sorry I let that lapse, somehow I managed to forget blogging existed). Here’s the first, a snippet of a song with the working title “Supernumerary”

What else? There are a few concerts in the immediate future:

March 15 - ArtYard - Frenchtown, NJ

March 16 - Underground Arts - Philadelphia, PA

March 17 - Le Poisson Rouge - NYC, NY

March 21 - Big Ears Festival - Knoxville, TN

The show in Philadelphia is opening up for my old friends, the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. My connections to members of that band go back 20+ years to my 964 Natoma days. I first encountered Nils Frykdahl in the previous millennium while he was playing amplified flute in the rafters of the warehouse along with Dan Rathburn making noise and sparks with an arc welder that illuminated butoh performer Shinichi Moma Koga contorting himself on a metal grate. Anyway, Sleepytime is a delightful group of very talented avant garde art rockers and this year needs more of their unfiltered catharsis. I immediately said yes when they asked if I would play for one of their East Coast dates to support their new album.

The Big Ears festival is something I’ve wanted to play at for almost a decade, so I am beyond thrilled to be added this year. I’ll be sticking around for the festival to hear as many of the other artists as possible, it’s off the hook, check it out https://bigearsfestival.org/

More concerts dates are coming in the autumn. East, west, middle, as many as I can fit in ;-)

Thank you for listening!

Hello Listeners,

Happy Summer! I did some much-needed holidaying in foreign lands rich in pastries and protected bike lanes. I hope your summer has also had some joy in it.

(Drumroll-like cello tapping)

MY NEW STUDIO IS COMPLETE!!! Here it is:

There are tiny little things to be done, bits of trim, tweaks to the acoustic treatment, furniture etc… but it is functional. The whole thing took an epic 18 months from planning, to permitting to final construction and a few weeks ago I moved in and started using it! Once my son is back to school in September I will seriously get to work in there. I have several pieces already composed for another album and recording all those fiddly little cello parts will be my first project in this new space. I can’t tell you how relieved I am to finally have a quiet, private, lovely-sounding (it does sound nice) place to create again. It’s been a few years….five, to be precise. I can no longer call this beautiful room my Cello Cave I think. It’s more of a Cello Chapel.

What else have I been up to? I spent a couple months working on the score to a science series. I don’t think I’m allowed to say much about it yet but whenever the program is ready for the world, of course I will tell you. Other things that happened in the spring: I wrote (and conducted!) a piece for a pair of ensembles for Rehearsing Philadelphia, a joint project between musicians at the Curtis Institute and Drexel. It was a fun challenge to write music for other people to play. I’m going to continue this and have a new commission from the Vermont Symphony Orchestra to write a piece for their Jukebox Quartet.

Meanwhile, I have CONCERTS. Real live in-person concerts.

Sept 16 & 17 - Burlington, VT

Nov 11 - Boston, MA

Nov 12 - NYC, NY

Nov 13 - Philadelphia, PA

Nov 14 - Alexandria, VA

Nov 18 - Minneapolis, MN

Nov 19 - Madison, WI

Nov 20 - Chicago, IL

tickets for all at http://www.zoekeating.com/perform.html

You might've heard that the calendars of mid-size venues are crowded beyond belief. At the early part of this year, a tour in November was the soonest I was able to arrange and I did my best to get this one in before Thanksgiving. West Coast, I am sorry that we weren’t able to get in any shows this year. March/April 2023 is when I hope to get out there again. Also, traveling around Europe and seeing all the modern and lovely unclassifiable artists playing at festivals - gosh I would also love to play in Europe next year too. I don’t have representation there but will cast about to try and make that happen. As always, thanks for listening.

Hello Listeners,

I spent a solid chunk of this lonely pandemic winter writing music for a stunning film that is premiering this weekend on HBO. Oslo is a drama based on the true story of secret back-channel negotiations that led to the Oslo peace accords in 1993. It was originally a play, written by JT Rogers and directed by Bartlett Sher, who also directed this film adaptation. Andrew Scott and Ruth Wilson play the Norwegian couple behind the negotiations and a stunning cast of Palestinian and Israeli actors play the representatives of the PLO and Israel.

I co-composed the music with Jeff Russo and am so proud of the score we made. I stretched myself in new ways, writing for orchestra and piano in addition to playing all the cello parts in my usual Zoe-fashion. It was a delight to work with Jeff again. It was also therapeutic to have something big to work on while the pandemic shrank my world into a tiny dot containing only me and my son. There will be a soundtrack album available on all the major music services either on or shortly after the premier.

Oslo premiers on May 29 on HBO and will be available on demand the following day

https://www.hbo.com/movies/oslo

As for concerts, you might be asking, what happened to those concerts from 2020 that were cancelled and rescheduled for May and June of 2021? It is not yet safe for hundreds of people to gather in a room so those concerts are in the process of being rescheduled again. Every band and their mothers' bands and their kids' bands are competing to rebook their tours right now but I hope to have some dates to give you soon. One concert that IS happening is in Boulder, Colorado on Oct 2. Stay tuned.

http://www.zoekeating.com/live

It’s hard to believe here we are almost half way through 2021. As of this past week the leaves are back on the trees, little league games are happening, the farmers market is on again, I ate outside at a restaurant for the first time in 14 months, I hugged my neighbors and I got fully vaccinated against covid. Alex is still too young for a vaccine so we have not yet completely emerged from our little snow globe. Soon.

Thanks for listening and my love to you and yours,

Dear Listeners,

How about some catharsis? Join me for a full, livestreamed concert on Dec 4

I’m happy to announce a full-production, multicamera shoot from the stage of University of Vermont concert hall. You can buy tickets at this link:

https://www.uvm.edu/laneseries/zoekeating

What else is going on? The same as lot of you, I expect: trying to live my best life while caring for another human in the middle of a time of crisis and uncertainty? For the early part of the pandemic I focused on being the person my son needed while friends and family and school and sports and camps were off limits. Once I accepted it for what it was, it was actually a lovely summer but I would probably describe the effect on my career and sense of self as...annihilating.

In September, school started up again for 2 days a week so I kissed the ground and turned the power back on in my studio. Then in October...4 days a week!!...which feels like such a miracle in comparison to the remote-learning scramble that I know a lot of you are coping with. I am also lucky because although in person concerts are cancelled I seem to have work coming out of my ears. I’m scoring for two movies right now, have multiple commissions and additional projects lined up for all of next year. Covid cases are rising again in Vermont and I’m concerned that schools might close again but like everything else this year...I can’t control it so I try to do my part (please, wear masks!) while not stressing too much (I don’t always succeed at that ;-)).

That’s it really. Let’s try for a little musical catharsis on Dec 4. I know I could use it. I realize a livestream is not the same as us all being together in a room but one silver lining - the concert won’t sell out and all the seats are good!

May you and your loved ones stay well. Thanks for listening,

Zoë

I managed to compose bite-sized music for a few things while in lock-down. Here's of them, an episode of But Why? A Podcast for Curious Kids. It was done with help from my son who had strong opinions about where the music should go and let me know when I made it "too scary". Thank you Jane Lindholm and Vermont Public Radio!!

Dear Listeners,

It isn’t safe for us to be together yet so all my 2020 concerts are rescheduled for 2021:

May 18, 2021 - Minneapolis, MN - Cedar Cultural Center

May 19, 2021 - Chicago, IL - Thalia Hall

May 21, 2021 - Portland, OR - Aladdin Theater

May 22, 2021 - Seattle, WA - Neptune Theater

June 12, 2021 - Boulder, CO - Chautauqua Auditorium

Tickets available HERE

If you have a ticket for one of these concerts for this year, you can use it next year. Please contact the venues for refunds. Thank you.

Income aside, I think that playing concerts is for me what going to church might be like for others. Today marks my 100th day of social distancing and damn....a year is a big. This is going to be a long haul. I haven’t had the heart to put on a livestream yet, but I will.

Please stay well and be kind to each other.

Dear Listeners,

Gosh, it’s now going on 7 weeks of social-distancing for my son and I. Bonkers! I could never have imagined any of this. How are you coping?

The beginning weeks were rocky for both of us. Like a lot of you, I’m caring for a young person who’s world has also been turned upside down (again) and his needs can easily fill up my entire day. But I think an equilibrium of sorts has set in the last couple of weeks. I'm even escaping into my spare bedroom studio for an hour every now and then to write music. We love not getting up in the mornings until we are ready and every day there is breakfast and second breakfast. We are watching the Great British Bake Off in the evenings and maybe we will come up with something to do with the rutabagas in the weekly farm box.

I do wish Spring would hurry up and get to Vermont, because damn, it's still cold and occasionally snowing. Maybe Spring is on lockdown too. I am thankful that we have a cozy place to be and grateful to everyone who is working out there so that we can stay in. Like you, I’m anxious about the future but…one day at a time.

Before all this I had spent several months working on the score to The Edge of All We Know, a documentary about the Event Horizon Telescope. It was set to premiere in Copenhagen last month but of course the film festival was canceled. As soon as I have news about where you can see it, I will let you know. I left on tour the day after the score was done and was lucky to squeeze in 5 concerts before the world shut down.

As you’ve probably guessed, my May concerts have been postponed or canceled. There are still some opportunities to hear me though:

The Bang on a Can Marathon in NYC on May 1, 2, 3 is not happening in person…but 40 artists are participating in a livestream, me included, on May 3 from 3pm to 9pm.

Bang on a Can Marathon: May 3, 3pm EST

No one really knows what the future holds for live concerts right now but fingers crossed. For now my remaining May concerts have been rescheduled to the end of August:

- Boulder Chautauqua August 28. - Aladdin Theater n Portland August 30. - Cedar Cultural Center concert in Minneapolis Sept 1

(Also, stay tuned for a possible Chicago concert on Sept 2) All existing tickets will be honored and please contact the venues for refunds.

I was going to perform at Maria Popova’s amazing Universe in Verse on April 18th. Maria has managed to get many involved to record their bit for a streamed version. So last week I recorded something for a poem by Rebecca Elson and read by astrophysicist Janna Levin. I also, somehow, after Alex went to bed one night, wrote a short piece to go with a poem and reading by Marie Howe. Not really sure how I did that, or if it’s replicable but it did give me hope that maybe some small amount of creative work is possible while Pandemic Parenting. I do feel that much of my life I’ve been making limoncello out of lemons, so let’s see if I can make some more. You can watch the 2020 Universe in Verse on April 25 EST at 4:30pm, after which it will disappear.

Universe in Verse: April 25, 4:30pm EST

I will do my own livestream at some point, maybe a throwback to the ambient brunches we used to host years ago in San Francisco. Once I am successful at getting all those tracks of cello to live-mix themselves so that I have something worth listening to, I will let you know. ;-) To tide you over until then, here is a video from my performance at Kings Place in London last fall, shot beautifully by Michael Lebor with help from Sedge Thomson: Possible (live version), at Kings Place

If you want to download the track you can find it HERE

Thank you for listening and for making my career possible to begin with and… huge massive thanks to every single one of you who is out there, keeping the world together so that we can stay inside. Stay well.

Celloly yours, Zoë

Hullo Listeners,

Thank you everyone who came to see me in London a couple weeks ago. We recorded and videotaped the show and are editing it into consumable chunks. More as that develops!

Meanwhile, I'll be playing cello with Imogen Heap, Guy Sigsworth and the band again for their UK shows in November. If you follow Imogen you've probably already heard that the Continental Europe concerts were canceled due to Brexit uncertainty. The world right now...I won’t get into it but just sigh loudly....

Nov 10 - SWG3, Glasgow Nov 11 - Sage Gateshead, Gateshead Nov 12 - The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester Nov 15 - The Roundhouse, London

(tickets to these concerts avail at ImogenHeap.com)

I'll be spending the rest of the fall and winter writing music.

As for 2020....

I am in the process of planning a short East Coast tour for Feb 22-Mar 6. Following that, I'll be joining the delightfully nutty JoCo Cruise from March 7-14. Then, more North American dates are in the works for May and June. I’m just giving you a heads up so you can make some room in your calendars! Be sure to join my email list so that you can be the first to hear about concerts as soon as tickets are onsale.

Thank you for listening and have a lovely autumn!

One of the nice things about getting older is becoming aware of what you care about and are sensitive to. I know that the ability to get around on my own two feet, or by bike, is a key part of my well-being, so when I was looking for a new place to live, a walkable environment was at the top of my list of features our home needed to have.

Burlington Vermont isn’t always perfect for me but it is pretty damn walkable. We walk to restaurants, to cafes, to the lake and my favorite thing is the daily walk to school. It’s not ideal - we have to cross a busy road, the damp grass of a park, a citizen-made-cut-through-behind-a-baseball-diamond-to-a-gap -in-the-fence-and-across-a-nice-neighbor’s-yard, another road, a parking lot, a plank across a stream and more damp grass in the school playing field - but walking to school with the other kids and the shepherding parents makes me feel happy.

I thoroughly enjoy this morning walk but another reason I go along is because one particular street is really not safe - it’s a busy car street in the mornings and there is no crosswalk where the kids cross. Over the years, local residents have tried to get a crosswalk. Letters have been sent, petitions have been circulated, a plan was even drafted six years previously...but still the kids wait for a break in traffic to dash across.

The Burlington Vermont Department of Public Works has said they can’t build a crosswalk at this particular spot because there is no “Pedestrian Receiving Facility” on the park side of the road. They said that making a “Pedestrian Receiving Facility” would involve the parks department, which apparently makes it too complex an operation. They recommend walking elsewhere.

Sometimes in order to make their neighborhoods livable, citizens have to nudge slow-moving bureaucracies towards action.

Before dawn on Sunday, some neighbors made a pop-up crosswalk! It isn’t permanent - the next big rain will wash it away - but this beautiful fall morning, cars stopped and the kids crossed!

The last few years, I’ve taken a bit of a break from Thought Leading. I’ve had my own personal struggles and my thought leading has been directed at overcoming the disruption wrought upon life and by my husband’s cancer and death. I don’t mean to bring up my personal tragedy to get your attention but I do feel the need the need to explain why I haven't been as active an artists’ advocate as I once was.

However, important things are happening in the world of music royalties and I can’t sit on the sidelines.

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If you make music for a living, you might have been aware of the passage of the Music Modernization Act last year. The law sets up a non-profit entity called the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) to issue blanket licenses to streaming services and to collect and pay the owners of songs.

If you are a self-published, DIY songwriter, that is you.

Much like SoundExchange collects and distributes your digital performance royalties, this new MLC will collect and distribute your digital mechanical royalties.

This stuff, and mechanical royalties in particular, can be mind-numbingly boring but believe me, if you make a living off your songs, you need to pay attention. Your royalties are at stake and you have a short window of time to act.

Two groups have submitted proposals to the copyright office to run the MLC, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) and the American Music Licensing Collective (AMLC).

I have joined the board of the AMLC because I believe they will get mechanical royalties to the songwriters who earned them.

There is a pot of an estimated $1.2 billion in unmatched mechanical royalties that have yet to be paid to the people who earned them. The streaming services were required to pay the royalties, not to match them. Making a system for connecting songs to owners and getting these black-box royalties to the people who earned them will be primary tasks of the new MLC.

Why should DIY songwriters care?

Millions of songs are recorded every year and the vast majority of them are by “self-published” songwriters and composers like me. We control our own copyrights and are not represented by the major music publishers in the NMPA. We are the ones who will rely on the MLC to get us royalties that in many cases, we haven’t been paid before. I would bet my favorite pair of shoes that self-published songwriters like me wrote the songs that generated that pot of royalties.

The music publishers in the NMPA have direct deals with the streaming services. They have been collecting their royalties and will continue to do so without help of the MLC. This is the part that worries me: written into the law, and in fact lobbied for by the NMPA, is language that indicates board members of the MLC are able to recommend the pot of unmatched royalties be liquidated and distributed to themselves by market share.

This gaping hole in the law should make all DIY songwriters sit up and pay attention. The board of the MLC will get to say what happens to that estimated billion dollars and to all unmatched royalties going forward.

The publishers in the NMPA will not use the MLC yet they can recommend liquidating the pot of unmatched royalties and distributing it to themselves? Will they have any incentive to do the work required to match these royalties to the songwriters who should get it?

Without question, the AMLC has the least conflict of interest, the best technology proposal and the least incentive to recommend directing other people’s royalties to themselves, not to mention their budget is a fraction of the one proposed by the NMPA.

There are other things too. The AMLC doesn’t aim to make a single corporate-controlled database containing information about every composition in the world, which the NMPA does. I think we have experienced enough corporate consolidation of data, thank you very much. Instead, the AMLC’s proposal is for a decentralized network that pulls together data from the 100+ global music rights organizations and will use dynamic indexing, normalization and intelligent matching algorithms to connect songs with owners.

I trust the AMLC to get me my mechanical royalties.

If you are a songwriter, you have only until April 22 to tell the Registrar of Copyrights which group you think should handle your mechanical royalties.

Click here to make a comment with the copyright office.

Want to learn more? Tomorrow April 10 at 5:30pm Central time the AMLC is holding a town hall. I’ll be there by video conference. You can join on your phone or computer and ask questions by going here: https://zoom.us/j/188377751

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To survive in this era as an artist you have to maximize all possible revenue streams: live performances, sync licensing, subscriptions, merchandise, performance royalties, sound recording royalties, mechanicals. It takes some work to collect all the pieces of your royalty pie. Someday, I hope those of us who own our copyrights will be able to enter all our information once instead of many, many times in many, many places.

Imagine being able to identify yourself, your songs, your percentage ownership if you collaborated with someone, and then imagine collecting all the royalties — for the performance, for the recording, for the composition — without having to pay a hefty percentage for the privilege?