Right about now, Meiko is on the road – literally – en route from a gig last night at the Majestic Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin to the one she’s playing tomorrow night at the Walnut Room in Denver, Colorado. It’s quite a haul, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “The tour is going awesome,” she says without any trace of artifice or fatigue. “A couple of long drives, but it’s cool.” It’s her first as a headliner, but if the gains she’s made in support of self-titled debut are a portent of what lay ahead, it certainly won’t be her last.

Meiko – who was raised in the small town of Roberta, Georgia and currently lives in Los Angeles – has been ambitiously on the rise for the past two years, having independently released her enchanting batch of folk-pop confections in 2007. She subsequently signed with the Myspace/Interscope label, re-issuing Meiko in 2008 with one additional song, “Boys With Girlfriends,” which soon topped the iTunes Singer/Songwriter chart.

All the while, Meiko paid her dues, opening for the likes of Mat Kearney and Joshua Radin as well as partaking in the ever-popular Hotel Café tour with such artists as Rachael Yamagata, Erin McCarley, and Priscilla Ahn. Most recently, she collaborated with the Crystal Method on “Falling Hard,” the closing track of their latest album, Divided By Night.

“It’s been really, really good,” Meiko replies when asked how audiences are responding to her current live shows, but the same could also be said for how her career is progressing. In a conversation with Donald Gibson of BC Magazine, she discusses her ongoing evolution as an artist, including where (and from whom) she finds inspiration to write as well as what she has planned for the future.

When you moved to Los Angeles, was it with the intention of having this career?

Not at all. I was in Georgia; I went to college for one semester and I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do. And I decided to take a break and go hang out in Miami for a little bit with my sister. Then once I got there, she wanted to move to L.A. and I followed her.

Do you think living in Georgia, having come from such a small town, affected your songwriting or has an effect on your songwriting?

Article Author: Donald Gibson

A contributing music editor at Blogcritics, Donald Gibson devotes most of his writing to music criticism, paying particular attention to the craft and aesthetic of songwriting. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of South Florida.
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