Postcard from downtown Amsterdam

The name Danya Kurtz mightn’t mean much to you yet, but to thousands of music-mad Dutch, she truly is the bee’s knees. Despite never even headlining her own gig in Ireland or the UK, she sold out the legendary Paradiso venue in Amsterdam last week – a beautiful converted church where The Rolling Stones and U2 have tread the boards, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds shot the incendiary Live At The Paradiso live video.

We’re sitting in Danya’s dressing room overlooking one of Amsterdam’s many canals that resemble “concentric circles of hell” as depicted in the classic Camus novel The Fall. Danya is reflecting on her own ‘Dam phenomenon.

“It has taken off in Holland and the funny thing is that it happened immediately, for something I thought would be a slow build thing,” Danya muses. “The label (Munich Records) is small and overwhelmed. I sold more records in the first month in Holland than I did in one year in the States! So it is just starting to work on other countries like Spain and Germany.”

Kurtz began in the famed singer/songwriter scene in and around Greenwich and the East Village in New York City, where she moved after growing up in New Jersey. She became a regular at the Sin E Café.

“The first time I played in Sin E, Jeff Buckley was in the audience,” she fondly recalls. “Grace had only been out a few months, but all the musicians knew him and I was constantly listening to that album and it really inspired me in a way a record hadn’t since hearing Astral Weeks.

“I met him briefly that night and he seemed to like what I do. Then he went away and he died. I remember it being said that if you were depressed for months after either Kurt Cobain or Jeff Buckley died, it said a lot about the kind of person you are. Well, I was mourning Jeff for quite a long time.”

Prior to being immersed in the Lower East Side scene, Kurtz was another suburban New Jersey kid.

“By the time I was 16, I was writing songs,” she says. “The early-ish eighties were weird. There were only two or three women who weren’t tarts that were making music – maybe Annie Lennox and Chryssie Hynde and that was it. I remember buying music by anybody who had tits. I was just desperate for new things by women. I loved Joni Mitchell. I was buying her records but there wasn’t much new. Then, when I started college, Suzanne Vega and Tracey Chapman brought out stuff. There was a burgeoning touring singer/songwriter thing that existed completely apart from the mainstream music industry.”

After slogging away on the open nights herself, a break came in the form of Woodstock legend Richie Havens, who appears on her debut album Postcards From Downtown.

“I’d opened up for him a couple of times in the States,” she explains. “He told his manager that I was the best opening act he’d ever had, so I was asked to tour with him on and off for a couple of years. When it became time to make the record, I knew that I wanted some special vocal, like the way Kate Bush sings on ‘Don’t Give Up’ by Peter Gabriel, where its so soothing.

“He is exactly the way you’d imagine the man to be. He is the happiest guy you’ll ever meet, living in a happy Richie bubble. I’ve never seen him get too down, I’ve never seen him really pissed off.

“He is an inspiration. His music is so uplifting and there is me singing melodramatic songs about my love life!”