Keith McCurdy sits in his apartment with a baritone acoustic guitar, playing one of his newest songs. It’s called “Lillith”, and McCurdy’s lyrics paint a grim picture of her.
“Ditched by the good-looking people
with injuries everyone can see
she could’ve been high with dilated eyes
now she looks like the limbs of dead trees”
Much of McCurdy’s songs for Vudu Sister, a gothic folk ensemble out of Providence, are centered from female perspectives.
“It’s sort of a creative androgyny where I explore feminine perspectives that I feel really comfortable with, and it’s a singular sort of entity. It’s a persona.”
McCurdy’s lyrics, taking us to deep and dark corners, are elevated by Diane O’Connor and Isabel Castellvi. O’Connor plays violin and Castellvi plays cello.
“What I love about working with (Diane and Isabel) is we really unpack the songs and we’re going to be very deliberate of where we make our choices. And it’s refreshing. I haven’t had a collaborative environment like that in a long time.”
McCurdy grew up in North Providence. He describes his early years listening to his dad Chris’ bands playing in his basement, and a few formative moments involving Nirvana.
“My father was an older Gen-Xer, and he played bass and he played in bands, and I watched him and his buddies, these 20-something-year-old guys who were just playing music in the basement. And it was just this wild, chaotic sound that attracted me, and I was just struck by that. And I got my first guitar at eight or nine. Nirvana was, well, he (Kurt Cobain) was alive, and I watched him on television, and my father got me the tapes. So my world was kind of created there.”
Since creating Vudu Sister in 2011, McCurdy has slowly evolved its sound and presentation. The biggest shift came when McCurdy decided to pursue a degree at URI years after dropping out of high school.
“My time at school was actually fairly traumatic, so I kind of had to drop out and I got my GED. Years later around my late twenties, I felt it was important to go back and try to take a stab at getting my education just kind of for its own sake.”
McCurdy attended the University of Rhode Island, where he studied Classics in Ancient Rome and Greece. Inspired by an array of languages, histories, and stories, McCurdy applied his newfound knowledge to his music.
“I fell absolutely in love with it. See, I looked at it as the way I look at art and music. This is something I can draw from, give myself more colors on my palette or ammunition for more work.”
In 2021 Vudu Sister released “Burnt Offerings”, an EP that McCurdy was able to create through a grant from URI. The songs are all written and performed in Latin and Ancient Greek.
“I wanted it to be informed by the literature that really I found to be very compelling and inspiring. So I looked at Ovid, who was an Augustine-period poet in the Roman Empire. He wrote a set of epistolary poems that are from the perspectives of women and ancient myth. And I already write songs from women’s perspectives very often. So I thought that was a great launchpad for me to approach this work.”
Now, McCurdy is working on Vudu Sister’s next album. He’s released a few songs already including “Passage of Ships”, which he wrote for his dad, who passed away in 2018.
“I always thought it would be a really nice gift to write a song for him. And it just hadn’t really popped for me until last year. And it’s about seeing him in a dream and the idea that a dream could be a place where we see our loved ones that are gone and to catch up, and not in a melancholy way, just, ‘Hey, I’m hanging out. This is great. I’ll see you later.’”
Check out Vudu Sister performing on Ocean State Sessions with their song “Having Trouble Sleeping” below.
