We recently connected with Keith McCurdy and have shared our conversation below.

Keith, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I knew I wanted to pursue the life of an artist at a very early age. From the moment I started humming a tune, the moment I saw Nirvana on MTV in the early 90s, and of course, watching my father play in bands, rehearsing with his friends in the basement…he would take me to underground, local clubs to see live music, which was entirely transformative for me. As I got older, the desire to create and pursue this life never truly left me, even when I felt like I had to pretend to be working toward a traditional career path. It has to be a calling, something you can’t live without doing. And it must be pursued with narrow, single-minded drive. You really can’t have a plan B, and there’s no guarantee of “success”, but to create a body of work that you are proud of cannot be taken away, regardless of what fate determines for you.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a singer-songwriter for the gothic folk ensemble Vudu Sister from Providence, RI. I first got involved in professional performance in the early 2000s, fronting my first rock band. Being comfortable on stage and singing in front of people never felt foreign to me. After years of honing my songwriting, drifting between different bands and exploring various genres, I started Vudu Sister as a way to be self-sufficient, which is why I picked up an acoustic guitar; it was an economical and logistical choice. The idea behind The Sister was always to have an ensemble and be collaborative, but also to be able to continue regardless of who is with me. I have been fortunate to have been playing and collaborating with my violinist, Diane O’Connor, for the majority of The Sister’s tenure (nearly fifteen years).
Under Vudu Sister, I have recorded and released several albums. The third album, Mortist Nervosa, I started to tighten what would become my “sound”, which has been heavily reliant on strings. I find that working with a more classical sound paired with my sensibilities as a songwriter has given the work a timelessness and complements the gothic macabre mood I often look to evoke.
I think another quality that makes our sound is my particular vocal timbre and how I use my voice as an instrument rather than a vehicle for the lyrics. I consider myself a singer first, and I use the guitar as a vehicle for my voice. Another reason I have been drawn to working with string instruments is how much we can complement and harmonize with each other. I find myself often riffing off Diane’s violin or Isabel’s (Castellvi) cello. The strings with my voice, I feel, bring the work alive in a way that traditional rock and roll instruments aren’t able to do in the way I prefer.

A little background also, I had gone back and studied at the University of Rhode Island, getting my B.A major in classical studies and English literature. I learned to read and write in Latin and Ancient Greek, which led me to compose new songs written in those languages for my album “Burnt Offerings” (2021), for which I received a university grant to help fund. The songs are informed by much of the poetry and mythology of classical antiquity, in particular Ovid’s Heroides, a set of epistolary poems written from the perspectives of heroines in ancient myth. I used this basic idea as a foundation for the work in which I sing from the perspectives of women and goddesses of classical myth and tragedy. A major theme in my work is exploring women’s perspectives, as I find their experience not only to be relatable personally but crucially important. Patriarchal narratives have dominated and destroyed the divine feminine in so much of literature throughout history.

Diane and I met our friend, Isabel Castellvi, in 2022 during an event in Providence, RI called Cellofest, and we started collaborating very quickly after to begin writing our fifth album this year. We are releasing singles up to its release. The album is called “Adynata”, a Greek word meaning “impossible tasks/things”. The word itself is a literary device commonly found in fairy tales and fables. A lot of the themese and motifs in this new work center on very personal reflections of home, what home means to an individual and a culture and how the comfort one feels in that space can change and shift to sometimes a terrifying place so much so that it forces one to have to leave that space and find that feeling of home elsewhere. This is especially significant in a song called The Valley, which alludes to the mythic Gehenna or “Valley of Wailing”, a place of death and damnation. I did not write this initially as a political song, but I could not help but consider the horrors of what the people of Palestine have been experiencing for too long as they have watched their home become hell. This is a reality for so many on this planet for so long. I think it takes skill to tackle topical issues in art, and I have never set out with the hubris in thinking that I have something specific to say, but I do value the applicability that art can take on and its multiplicity of meaning.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I come from a rough, poor background. I struggled with a lot of adversity on many fronts as I was coming up: home, school, etc. I was very much a loner and an outsider. There was addiction in my family, mental illness, and then the kind of experiences I had at school were challenging at the least and horrifying at the worst. Nevertheless, music was always this solitary, nearly religious escape and succor for me. I would spend hours in the dark of my room just letting myself be taken to whole other worlds. Getting my first guitar, playing in clubs, and cutting my teeth led me to have a narrowly driven focus on not compromising my goals. I have been hired and fired from every job I have ever held. I deal with severe bipolar disorder, which has made employment and life in general extraordinarily challenging. I still commit to my work as an artist, and I am always thinking about the next project. I learn more every day about this industry/business/sphere and continue to grow, evolve, and get better overall at my craft. One thing I will say is that this industry constantly changes, there’s no handbook, and you HAVE to be humble enough to accept adapting and evolving with it. The time to be an artist is during creation, after the work is done, you have to get smart and have grace and humility in the face of changes and challenges.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Easily answered: The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is that moment during creation where you reach about 90-95% completion of whatever it is you’re working on (in my case, a new song) and you know you’ve got a great piece of work on your hands. That is the single best, most euphoric feeling I get in life.
This isn’t a unique perspective, but I concur with the philosophy that most of what you write is likely garbage and that within maybe ten percent of what you work on might be decent, and in that ten percent, maybe there’s a fraction of a percent that is truly brilliant. It is imperative to work those writing muscles and constantly be creating to heighten your chance of capturing the Muse’s attention.
I also think that it’s a mistake to overly romanticize what we do; I think the magic is important, but it has to be respected as a skill and that in order to do great work, you have to acknowledge it as work. Hone your craft, value what you do as a skill.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/vudusister
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/vudusister
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/vudusister
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@vudusister

Image Credits

JP Nelson – studio photos
Colleen Morgan – live performance photo of trio (color)
Mike Spencer – live performance photo of duo (color)
Unknown – live performance photo of duo (black and white)