Keppie Coutts
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Blend the mellow tones of Norah Jones with the quirky pop of Feist and the fire of Ani DiFranco into a Chagall painting, and you get Keppie Coutts. Keppie’s tunes are earthy, sophisticated, and direct – heart-squeezing, uplifting, and sometimes hilarious. Multi-Grammy award-winning artist John Mayer heard a new tune of Keppie’s (‘Waiting for the Avalanche’) and within a week, had taken it into the studio in Boston to record. Keppie had scored a private audience with Mayer as one of 12 young songwriters hand-selected to spend the week with Mayer in 2008.
Keppie started out spreading her words as poetry at local Sydney arts haunts and indie spaces. The immediate connection that she forms with an audience saw Keppie performing at some of Sydney’s best-known venues for live music, including international jazz-hub, The Basement as part of a selection of the city’s best songwriters.
A sojourn to the States saw Coutts catapult from student to faculty at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 5 short years, teaching in the Songwriting Department in 2010. Since then, Keppie’s music has appeared on international radio and prime time television, and Coutts has taught songwriting at the Songwriting School of Los Angeles, Berklee Online, and for us at the Conservatoirum Open Academy in her native Sydney.
To her surprise and delight, people often approach Keppie after shows, making excited comparisons to Norah Jones, Ani DiFranco, KT Tunstall, and Feist, though as one fan put it: “You sound like a million different women and like no one else”.