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  Idgy Vaughn - Good Enough
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IDGY VAUGHN CLIFF NOTES:

Idgy Vaughn is a Missouri-born songwriter based in Austin, Texas. "Critically acclaimed" barely even begins to describe her first album, "Origin Story," which was released in June. Idgy won the Kerrville Folk Festival's prestigious New Folk Competition in 2004.

"Origin Story just might be the local debut album of the year." – Margaret Moser, Austin Chronicle

"Resonates with a rare authenticity." - David Brown, www.NPR.org

"A talent to watch." [four stars] - London's Daily Mirror

"A fantastic new voice with something to say." - Andrew Dansby, Texas Music Magazine

"Every song on Origin Story is instantly memorable, an unpredictable mix of pathos and humor. It's delivered by a sweetly powerful voice with a hint of a twang that sounds like Texas." - Eileen McClelland, Houston Chronicle

“…I've played this track probably, you know, six or seven times now over recent months on this program but each time I play it I get huge numbers of requests to play it again…. I think she's got a wonderful and tugging voice.” - Bob Harris, BBC Radio 2

IN A NUTSHELL: "It's hard not to notice Idgy Vaughn. The flame-haired singer-songwriter writes beautiful and sad songs and sings them in a high, lonesome voice that flits between mountain music and honky-tonk. Her debut Origin Story is a rough-edged charmer." - Houston Chronicle

THE TEDIOUSLY LONG BIO:

Idgy Vaughn
Origin Story

There are a few things you won't learn about Idgy Vaughn simply by listening to her debut album, Origin Story. Like the fact that she was born in Chillicothe, Missouri, a town otherwise best known — for the moment— as “The Home of Sliced Bread.” And that she was born on the same day that Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, which seems to perversely please her. In high school, she became pen pals with the late, great Saturday Night Live star Phil Hartman, around the same time that she first adopted the name “Vaughn” while working as a teenage deejay for a rock radio station in Quincy, Illinois. She skipped her senior year and enrolled in college early after scoring freakishly high on her ACT Assessment, but was “politely asked to leave” Quincy University at the end of her first semester after being busted for writing papers for football players. She’s been bitten by a hog (while eight months pregnant), lived in the projects, and, on her first trip to New York City, was mugged by a pair of 11-year-old boys. She once opened for Richard Thompson before having any clue who he was, and won the prestigious New Folk Competition for Emerging Songwriters at the 2004 Kerrville Folk Festival despite breaking down in a fit of laughter mid-performance due to an instrument malfunction. She has no concept of time whatsoever but is obsessed with watches, and her right leg is almost an inch shorter than her left — a condition that, by her own admission, makes her a bit of a “gimp.”

Oh, and “Idgy” is a nickname that’s stuck to her, for better or worse, since infancy, when her 3-year-old sister couldn’t pronounce “Audrey.”

Give or take a few other undisclosed quirks and misadventures, though, and everything else you really need to know about Idgy Vaughn is right there on her first record. True to its title, Origin Story is the story of Idgy’s life so far, and it’s a story much better told through her own voice and songs than in any formal bio or FAQ sheet. “The record is extremely autobiographical,” she says, then hastily adds, “with of course the obvious exception of the murder ballad, which I have to, for the record, state is completely fiction.

“If I didn’t know me,” she continues, “I’d want to know me, because I’d want to know how the stories ended.” This is a woman who knows her way around a hook, both in song (all over the place, both musical and emotional) and in conversation (the moment during any story when she inevitably drops the line, “No, wait — here’s the best
part ….”)

But Origin Story is more than just a chronicle of where Idgy Vaughn’s been and how she got here, a portrait of the artist as a young woman and single mother. It’s the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, a triumph of persistence and faith over adversity. It’s the first chapter in what is certain to be long and richly rewarding (artistically and otherwise) career by one of the freshest and most compelling songwriting voices to emerge out of the Texas and Americana scene in some time.

Origin Story is all that, and a hell of a good record, to boot. The tracks are graced by some of the best players that the storied Austin music scene has to offer, including esteemed guitarists Redd Volkaert, Rob Gjersoe, and Guy Forsyth, pedal steel player Lloyd Maines, fiddle player Eamon McLoughlin, keyboard players Riley Osbourn and Earl Poole Ball, bassist Glenn Fukunaga, background vocalists Ruthie Foster and Pauline Reese and drummer Paul Pearcy, who produced the album with engineer The East Side Flash at Austin’s Flashpoint Recording studio. But above and beyond the talent of the players involved, what really makes Origin Story stand out is the songs and Idgy herself.

“Some people are just better singers and songwriters than others, and when you’ve got really good stuff to work with, everything else is easy,” says Pearcy, who first encountered Idgy at the Kerrville Folk Festival the year she won the New Folk contest. “I’ve been going to Kerrville for years, and when you see and hear people like Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett out there, their stuff is just a cut above the rest. And I thought Idgy fit into that category.”

How Idgy found her way to the Kerrville stage in the first place is a tale somewhat on the order of Homer’s The Odyssey, albeit with the protagonist navigating a sea of distractions and pitfalls trying to get the hell away from home instead of back to it. Her journey started as all the great ones do: with boredom.

“I was constantly bored,” she says of her childhood. “Now I know it’s because I have really bad A.D.D., but back then, they just called it being ‘aimless.’ I was always trying to figure out a way to make my reality more interesting than it really was.” For a small town, midwestern girl growing up on a hog farm, escape came through books and music. “And then I became a writer myself because I thought the songs I heard and the books I read could be better,” she laughs. “I was so pissed off at the way that Gone With the Wind sequel, Scarlet, ended, that I wrote a 100-page different ending for it. And then I’d hear a song and try to pick it out on piano, and I’d think, ‘Oh, I’d like it a lot better if it went and did this instead!”

By the time the hog farm went bust and her family moved to the “big” city (the sleepwalking metropolis of Quincy), Idgy was already planning a much bigger escape. From her early teens, and long before she ever played a song in public, she was convinced that she was destined for the big time. After her brief college stint, she found a gig writing for the local newspaper, a short layover on the road to stardom. But then she briefly dated and broke up with a local “Mr. Wrong.” Pregnant and on her own at 20, Idgy’s train jumped the track before ever leaving the station. Another five years — an eternity in Quincy time — would pass before she finally got back on course. But even when pushed to the back burner, her dream continued to simmer.

“I played a couple of open mics at a coffee shop I worked at, and got enough of a taste of it to realize that I was doing the wrong thing staying in Quincy,” says Idgy. “I started kind of eyeballing my daughter, Georgia, and those little thoughts started creeping in, those little regrets, and always feeling like I was in the exact opposite place that I should have been… And I realized, ‘This is not who you want to be, this is not who you want to be in front of her. You need to suck it up and leave. Now.’”

She’d read about Austin, Texas — self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World.” Sight unseen, that sounded about right to her. In early 2001, she packed up her daughter, her belongings and her life savings and drove south. Within 100 days of first landing in Austin, she was playing solo and testing the waters at every open mic night she could get to between raising her daughter and holding down waitress jobs, most notably at a truckstop south of town that inspired “Truckstop Waitress” (one of the two songs that cinched her New Folk win). It was at the truckstop that she met a most unlikely friend and “adopted grandpa,” a retired bridge builder, rancher and full-blooded Texas “coot” straight from central casting named Rodney. It was Rodney who convinced Idgy to quit her truckstop job in the summer of 2003 so she could attend a songwriter’s workshop at Kerrville (it would be her first trip out to the annual festival), and Rodney who later — just when Idgy had burned through her life savings tending to a sudden illness — purchased a lottery scratch card, won a million bucks and loaned her the money that made her dream of making Origin Story a reality.

But no, wait, here’s the best part. Or rather, the worst. Hot off of her New Folk win and just as she went into the studio, Idgy was derailed again — this time by a heartbreaking fallout with her already estranged family back home that culminated, surreally, with a courtroom battle with her parents for custody of her own daughter. She ended up winning, but it remains the one episode of her life that visibly pains Idgy to talk about. “My family died that day,” she says. After returning to Austin with her daughter, she was still in a state of shell shock when Pearcy told her they needed one more song.

“We sat there for four hours, and I played him song after song after song,” says Idgy. “And finally, in the last 10 minutes, he said, ‘Play me what you’re working on right now.’ I’d been working on a song about my mother, based on everything I’d just been through, and I played him one line: ‘I’m giving up on your love/I’m giving up on ever being good enough.’

“Paul said, ‘Go home and write the rest of that.’ And I thought, ‘Oh God, anyone but that one!’ It was still so painful. It’s still painful.”

That song about a daughter coming to terms with the loss of a mother’s love, “Good Enough,” ended up being the record’s emotional linchpin, counterbalanced by “Pearl of Georgia,” about Idgy’s own daughter. But one must stop just short of calling either of those songs “highlights,” if only because Origin Story is a record that moves from strength to strength with alarming frequency. For sheer emotional wallop, both “Good Enough” and “Pearl of Georgia” are easily matched by “Truckstop Waitress,” “Midwestern Biography” and especially the devastating “Saint Francis Fire,” a haunting memorial for 12 little girls who died in a fire during a Christmas play at a Catholic school in Quincy in 1899. But far from being a record to slit your wrists to, Origin Story is just as winning with its playful side, exemplified by the winsome — and impossibly catchy — opener, “Redbone Hound,” the sexy sass of “Small Town Girls” and “Mr. Wrong,” and of course the aforementioned “murder ballad,” “Dragging the River.”

From triumph to heartbreak and back again, it’s a record that plays out exactly like every good story of Idgy Vaughn’s life. Most of all, the one starting right about now, with the great, wide-open future stretched out before her.

“No, wait … here comes the best part.”

— Richard Skanse


Contact:
idgy@idgyvaughn.com
(512) 517-1621