Nights in the Co-op Kitchen

I went to a small liberal arts college in Ohio where weekend entertainment options were limited to on-campus theater, house parties, and the occassional out-of-town musician stopping by our coffeeshop on the way to Cleveland, Detroit, or Pittsburgh.  Given the dearth of options, most musicians who stopped by were treated to large audiences desperate for new music, as was the case when Erin McKeown played a show there early in her career.

“Blackbirds” brings me back to the weeks after that show when the Distillation album was in heavy rotation on campus boomboxes and MP3 players.  She had explained the story behind the song, which was a fairly ubiquitous tale of a drunken weekend night in a college co-op.  Our college had plenty of co-ops – dorms and kitchens that were managed and operated entirely by students – and everyone on campus had their own version of McKeown’s story.  Friday nights making pizza, Sunday mornings trying to make pancakes for 50 people with a hangover, refrigerators breaking and ingredients going missing.  The song’s veiled, quasi-nursery rhyme lyrics made it easy for any and all of these stories to fit into the song’s narrative.

Whenever I hear “Blackbirds” now, I’m reminded of walking into the kitchen of any co-op, hearing McKeown’s sultry voice and gritty guitar wafting out of a cheap, old boombox, the cooks adding their own voices to the air full of music and the smell of a late-night snack.