Priscilla to record xmas & Sinatra song

Getting into the Christmas spirit early
Tom Harrison, The Province

It's probably hard to get the Christmas spirit in Los Angeles in December. Harder still to get into it in August.

This is the challenge Priscilla Ahn faces. She's due to record a Christmas song for a forthcoming CD and hasn't completely made up her mind about what she'll do. Likely, it'll be a version of "Silent Night," for which she's shaping in her mind a concept of how it should sound and be arranged.

"It's not an easy task to do a Christmas song," she allows and giggles quietly. Later, she's also contributing to a Frank Sinatra album. For this Ahn has decided on "I'll Never Smile Again," but unlike "Silent Night," for which she'll mould her voice to an idea, for the Sinatra song she'll just sing in her own style.

Her own style is an unaffected singer-writer, almost folk approach. Signed to Blue Note, Priscilla Ahn could be the label's next Norah Jones. The singers aren't remotely alike but if Jones sneaks up on you, so does Ahn. In that respect, they are alike.

Ahn isn't a lifelong fan of Sinatra. What she knows of old baggy eyes has come from going to her neighbourhood record store, Counterpoint, and buying vinyl long players that look cool for a dollar each.

"I buy a bunch of them," Ahn exclaims. "I love them so much and I listen to them all the time."

Now a Los Angeles resident, Ahn has done a little bit of moving about. Born in Georgia, as Priscilla Hartranft, she was raised in various Pennsylvania towns and lived for 10 years in South Korea, eventually taking Ahn as her last name as an acknowledgment of her Korean mother's maiden name. She toured and sang with Amos Lee and Brandi Carlisle before making the Joey Waronker-produced A Good Day album. It's a sparse-sounding record built around Ahn's acoustic guitar over which her light, easy voice floats. It's notable for its judicious details such as the singing saw, which sounds so much like a theramin, that appears on "Find My Way Back Home."

"There is a sort of interlude at the end of 'Astronaut' [another song from A Good Day] that gave me an idea," she explains. "I sang it like a theramin. We ended up not using it on 'Astronaut,' but the idea was there. When it came time to do 'Find My Way Back Home' I thought of theramin but Joey said, 'I know this musical saw player.' I thought that would be awesome. So it was his idea.

"When it was all done," Ahn continues, speaking of the finished album, "I sort of looked at it objectively. It was hard to see it, pragmatically. I'm really proud of it but I had a lot of trouble deciding what songs should be on the album. It's impossible to put them all on. And I'm really bad at making decisions, even simple ones, like, where to eat lunch."