Story and Photos by Emilee Booher
About a year ago, twenty-six-year-old Ila Kriegh stood on a cramped and dimly lit stage preparing to play a song she wrote about her older sister. Born with the condition cerebral palsy, Kriegh’s sister sat stiffly in a wheelchair in the center of the crowd. The venue was a small and intimate coffee shop with no more than fifty people in the audience. All heads were pointed toward Kriegh’s casually dressed, slender figure and her signature feather hairclip that held back a few golden blonde locks.
With her deep green eyes fastened on her sister’s muscle-locked face, Kriegh began strumming the slow, acoustic rhythm of her song “Call It A Day.” C, F, C, G7, she played gracefully brushing her pick up and down the guitar strings. As the song moved from measure to measure, the audience yearned to listen to every passing note.
“Across from the table my mother would say, ‘your sister, well she’s slowly wasting away,’” Kriegh sang weaving in and out of a delicate falsetto. “All we can do is to watch and to pray and try to appreciate the beauty in decay,” she softly continued as the weeping fiddle joined in. Her sister sat with her head gently tilted, looking as if she were staring into a world that no one else could see.
Many tightened their lips trying to hold back the tears that were forming during the emotional exchange between the two sisters. Even the other members of the band had wet lines streaming down their cheeks as they tried to stay focused on their instruments.
For Kriegh, writing and performing this song was a vital form of self-expression. The University of Oregon graduate and singer of The Bad Mitten Orchestre needs her music in order to breathe. It is an amorphous emotional release that she uses to comment on the people and situations in her life. It is a way for her to tell stories and paint lyrical pictures. Sometimes the content is deep and heartbreaking like in the song about her sister, but other times it is light and uplifting. It all depends on how the soulful singer/songwriter is experiencing the world at the time.
Born in Klamath Falls and raised in Eugene, Kriegh has always been a naturally gifted singer. When she was young, she was an active participant in school choir and musicals, landing her first lead role in the school musical in fifth grade. “I was so proud of myself,” she says in recollection.
Continuing on a musical path, she picked up her first guitar in middle school. Aside from the occasional bass and ukulele, Kriegh sticks with an acoustic guitar and her vocals as her two main instruments. When she reached high school, she wrote countless songs and played them for solo gigs around town.
“I remember feeling like the song would come so fast that I felt like I was just writing down what someone else was telling me,” she says recalling her high school song writing days. “I don’t even remember how I found the chords, but something sounded right, and I’d just start speaking it or singing it.”
After dabbling around in a couple local bands including Butterfly Blue and Atrial Flutter, Kriegh serendipitously landed a lead role next to Naima Muntal in the Eugene band The Bad Mitten Orchestre in 2007. The band’s music is difficult to categorize, but some of the hybrid combinations that have been thrown around are “gypsy-folk-grass” and “vaudeville-grass-folk-rock.” It combines the sounds of percussion, an upright bass, a cello, a banjo, an accordion, a ukulele, a fiddle, an acoustic guitar and hair-lifting vocal harmonies to form its eclectic sound. Whatever the classification of the music, the band is rapidly rising in the Eugene and Portland area. And Kriegh has been a big reason why.
Generally on the quiet and reserved side of the social spectrum, Kriegh lights up the room when she takes the stage, whether solo or with her band. She delights her audience with humble exuberance and a personality that magnifies the testament of her songs. Always flashing a smile, she enjoys casually laughing and talking with the crowds to loosen everyone up, including herself.
But once she starts a song, she comes alive. “It’s a weird thing, I definitely feel like it’s my alternate personality in a way,” she says describing her persona on stage. “It’s kind of like being in a play. It feels like you’re not quite yourself … there’s something freeing and empowering about that.”
If being on stage is like being in a play, then Kriegh easily plays multiple characters. From whispering and harmonized songs such as “Let’s,” which she sings with Muntal, to foot-stomping, deep-throated numbers such as “Tumbledown,” she nails it all. Switching between revealing and profound solo performances, to beer-sloshing, whiskey drinking full band performances, Kriegh has a way of shining in any setting. She especially causes a stir when she does an alarmingly difficult opera-esque, falsetto cooing with her voice in the band’s ironically energetic song “Sleep.”
Along with her entrancing stage presence, Kriegh’s songwriting is poetic and honest. She’s written a number of songs for herself and The Bad Mitten Orchestre that are disarmingly open and intimate. She doesn’t use a specific formula to write songs, but instead she writes what she’s feeling when she’s feeling it. “You know it’s going to be good when it just kind of flows through you … it’s like a gift from God,” she says.
The lyrics generally flow out of her in the form of narratives that recount a situation and poetic stanzas that describe a broader feeling of a situation. “I’m a really visual person so I like to write songs that paint pictures in your mind,” she says. “I also like to express things as simply and to the point as possible.”
In her more imaginative song “Saints,” the last track on The Bad Mitten Orchestre’s newest album, Kriegh paints a picture of an eerie bar in which fictitious characters from the past, present and future come to commiserate with one another. She creates a dark and dreary scene that sounds straight out of an Old Western film by piling tension upon tension with unresolved guitar chords and an ailing fiddle. With a deep voice, she starts the lyrics with, “There were seven bloody Mary’s at the edge of the bar, waiting for seven bloody men to step in.” The rest of the verse goes on to describe the horror of the townspeople over the men making their way to the bar. Then the chorus kicks in: “This is the place for beggars and borrowers, harlots and jokers, lonely tomorrowers, put down your glass and raise up your flask to the saints of the Blue Avenue.” She switches between singing boldly and delicately, pulling the listeners in to the stage of the song.
Kriegh’s voice and storytelling encourage listeners to visualize the events unfolding in the song. She wants her lyrics in combination with the instrumentation to make the characters in her music come alive, as if they are dancing around her.
People are a common theme in her songs. Kriegh’s music illustrates a genuine compassion for human emotion and individual stories. Many of the songs she writes are about the people who have affected her life in one way or another, including her sister. “If you were to look back through all of my art, she’s always there in everything I do,” she says.
Another one of her more popular songs, “Blue Skies,” quietly unveils a story about her friend who was admitted into a psychiatric institution. She sings it tenderly and softly as if she were privately singing it to him in is room. It opens with, “Mom came into my deli today to tell me the news of how your mind went away.” It continues into the chorus, “Blue skies, blue skies, clouds are floating in that space behind your eyes.”
She often loads this kind of imagery into her songs. She compiles metaphors, visual descriptions and playful word combinations in her lyrics to express the narratives and emotions she’s trying to convey. The simple and poetic words in Kriegh’s songs bare some of her most personal stories and experiences. “Of course I’m attached to them because they come from a very deep place … I’m close to them lyrically,” she says. “I tend to be a really sensitive, emotional person and [music] has been a good way for me to express that.”
This explains her love of minor chords. In particular, she often leans toward a D minor, a chord that sounds well aware of pain but also rings with an optimistic tone. In this sense, the D minor chord sums up her music, although many other chords still manage to find their places in her songs.
Outside of her music, Kriegh continues to share her passion for people by teaching first grade in the Department of Special Education at Crest Elementary School. She also finds ways to explore additional forms of art and self-expression. With a degree in Fine Arts, she is dedicated to visual arts, especially drawing and painting, through which she continues to tell her stories.
Kriegh isn’t looking to her songs to bring her success and fame. What’s most important to her is simply continuing to play. “I would love to share my music, my passion, and my thoughts through music with a lot more people if they want to hear it, but as far as making money and getting famous, I don’t care,” she says. In her future, she hopes to keep playing both solo and with her band. She is constantly finding significant value in both.
But regardless of where the future brings her, the music will always flow out of her. It has to.
“It’s a feeling,” she says when describing her love for music. “When anybody hears his or her favorite song, it strikes some sort of nerve that’s nostalgic. To be the person who writes that song … ” she says, fading into silence.
She doesn’t have to finish the sentence. For many people, she has already written that song.
See Kriegh live with the Bad Mitten Orchestre at the Oregon Country Fair on July 9.
