Jennifer Eberlein

When it comes to musical talent, the gods in charge of chromosomal distribution clearly were playing favorites with Kristen Hall. You kind of have to feel sorry for all those poor folks who must have been cheated out of their fair share in order to compensate for the gifts given to Kristen; a raconteuse extraordinaire.

Sitting down to lunch with the 29-year old acoustic singer/songwriter, and listening as she spins tale upon tale in the course of a normal conversation, you're stuck with the notion that each of her stories could be a song, if only she added a tune. ("In a broken-down Bedford, we headed up north for the country...")

"Lyrics come first with me," she explains. "Typically, all of my main musical influences -- Jackson Brown, Jules Shear, Aimee Mann -- are also motivated by lyrics. Jackson Brown is a poet. If you take away the music, you are still really motivated by (his work). If the same can be said about my music, then I feel I'm doing something right."

Kristen is doing a lot right. She is unquestionably one of the most prolific and talented songwriters in the acoustic scene. Now in the third year or a co-publishing development contract with with Bertlesmann Music Group, she is preparing also for for the upcoming release of Fact & Fiction, her long-awaited follow-up album to her stellar first effort, Real Life Stuff, and soon she will embark on the first leg of a national tour with Indigo Girls. Kristen Hall is finally beginning to get some of the recognition that is her due.

Born and raised in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, Kristen says she knew she wanted to be a musician from the time she was old enough to speak. "I have pictures of myself where I'm about four years old, and I'm sitting at our playing piano and I could barely touch the keys and I could barely hold on to pump the pedals, but I'm singing at the top of my lungs," she says.

When she was about nine, her cousin, Jimmy Gold, hit the charts with the song "Nice to be with You." While other kids were bringing their various flotsam and jetsam to show-and-tell, Kristen was showing off Jimmy's hit records and believing that life as a professional musician was within reach.

She began playing guitar at 13, but by the time she reached high school, she says she started feeling pressure to re-direct her energies to the pursuit of a more traditional career, and so, temporarily shelved all thoughts of the music profession.

Around 1982, after managing a pizza parlor, selling shoes and working as a paste-up and layout artist for a small Florida newspaper, Kristen decided to take some college courses in Peachtree City, Georgia, where her parents had moved a couple of years before. She admits she was a bit leery of the idea of moving to Georgia. When asked why, she grins and launches into yet another story. "I think it came mainly from an episode of Charlie's Angels, where the girls are driving through Georgia and they get pulled over by a cop who plants drugs on them, busts them, puts them in a bean-picking camp and makes them screw the mayor's friends on weekends," she says, without ever pausing to breathe. "And I thought that was going to happen to me." It hasn't, she adds.

She says boredom eventually led her to Atlanta in 1983, where she landed a job at the Metropolitan Gazette, a paper which covered all of the entertainment in Mid-Town. Eventually, she left the paper and went to work at a store called Far East Futons. Far East owner Frank French also operated his own recording studio, and was then producing the Indigo Girls' first EP. Frank offered Kristen the title of co-producer on the Girls' project. "He gave me this co-producer's credit basically for making coffee," she says.

By 1987, the Girls were covering a song Kristen had written, and Amy Ray repeatedly asked her to come up on-stage and perform a few songs on her own, Kristen says. "I had really bad stage fright, but Amy would encourage me to get up there and do it. I'll bet she introduced me on 40 or 50 different occasions, and 'whoosh' I'd be out the door. But she never gave up and eventually I did go."

Kristen adds that she hated performing at first, but she kept at it and, in 1989, she recorded her first demo, Kristen Hall, the copies of which she ran off on her tape player at home. At about the same time, she also recruited the first of three incarnations of the Kristen Hall Band, each of which lasted about 6 months.

After a year and a half of playing with the various bands, she returned to solo performing because she found that working with a band was too taxing on her time. "I was doing everything with the band -- booking shows, fronting it, being the tour manager -- and it left me very little time to fulfill my songwriting commitment to BMG, and I am under contract to write for them," she says.

Kristen says she does not know if the story behind the way in which her songwriting contract allegedly came about is true or not. "I cannot verify the story, because I wasn't there," she says. "But apparently, in 1990, Bonnie Raitt was a panelist at a producers' seminar in Nashville. Someone had given her one of my tapes, and she held it up and said, 'Here's a great example of when you have good songs, you can have a shitty sounding tape and it doesn't have to be overproduced because good songs are good songs."

Suddenly, calls were flooding into the office of Kristen's attorney, Russell Carter. A bidding war ensued between several different publishing companies, but Kristen went with BMG, the parent company of Arista and RCA, because, she says, "They were the only company who never said anything bad about any of the other companies, so I went with them."

Kristen's deal with BMG obligates her to write 10 songs per year for them, with the understanding that if she gets signed to a major label, BMG will hold her songs in good faith, so that she might eventually record them.

In 1990, Kristen recorded Real Life Stuff, her first full-length LP, costs of which were paid for by Dorn Hetzel, who broke even on the project and then moved to Budapest. She says she has not heard of him since.

Now on Amy Ray's Daemon Records, Kristen will be releasing Fact & Fiction on April 21, after lengthy health-related delays. She contracted pneumonia in New York in September, and did not fully recover until early this year. Kristen says she signed on with Daemon because it was the perfect opportunity to repay Amy for her long-time support. "Doing the record for Amy instills a lot of motivation in me because I really feel I owe her something and I'm going to work my ass off for her," Kristen says.

Guest artists on the new record include: John Ashton of the Psychedelic Furs, Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls, Cindy Wilson of B-52s and Sara Lee, formerly of Gang of Four and B-52s.

Kristen also plans an album release party for April 26, at the Variety Playhouse. The show starts at 9:00 pm and will cost somewhere around $5. The schedule is not yet set, but she hopes to have four or five of her musician friends come and do a song or two.

Between May 22 and June 7, Kristen will be back out on the road, opening for the Girls as they tour up the East Cost. Afterwards, she plans to return on her own to some of the same cities she'll hit on the Girls' tour, in order to maximize her exposure.

Kristen says she has seen many changes in Atlanta's acoustic scene vin the past five to 10 years, and laments that not all of them have been positive. "I think a lot of people stopped playing music because they wanted to play music, and they started playing music because they wanted to get a deal.

"I think people need to stick with what they do best. What I do best is writing these little acoustic pop songs, and it may be out of fashion for 10 years, but on the eleventh year, when it comes back around, I'm going to have this whole arsenal of songs. I missed a niche about four years ago. I wasn't ready then. Next time I will be."