New mom Krystal Keith gets back to country music career with hometown show
NORMAN — Krystal Keith has written a lot of cradle songs over the past year.
“I told my bandleader, ‘We might be touring on a lullaby album this year,’ ” she said with a laugh. “You know, it’s not as easy as it used to be to work on music. I’ve gone to Nashville a couple of times with her, and we’re going to go back this week for rehearsals. I write when I can … but it’s a little more difficult having a permanent sidekick.”
Six months after the birth of her first child, the Norman singer-songwriter is easing off the lullabies and back into her country music career, starting with a hometown show Thursday at the Sooner Theatre. It will be the first time she’s played her hometown since the 2012 Norman Music Festival.
“It’s going to be a little more intimate than my normal show. Being out on the road when you have 25,000 people, it’s a lot harder to connect individually to people than it is in a hometown show with just a few hundred seats, where it’s mostly your family and friends,” said Keith, the daughter of country superstar Toby Keith.
“I don’t really get nervous, but I will say I’m a little nervous, just ’cause I haven’t performed in so long. You always worry about like, ‘Crap, am I going to remember all the words?’ You go back to kind of when you first start performing, where not everything feels so comfortable and second nature. But I know it will be like riding a bicycle once I get out there.”
Embracing motherhood
Keith and husband, Andrew Sandubrae, welcomed their daughter, Hensley Jack Sandubrae, on Oct. 19. The entertainer said her daughter’s unusual name was inspired by her mother’s grandmother, whose maiden name was Hensley, as well as her father’s great-greatgrandmother, Callie Jacks, and her husband’s grandmother, Jackie. When she called her famous father with news they’d picked a name, his response was, “Huh. And you said it’s a filly.”
“In his mind, everything is horses, so I go, ‘Yep, she’s a filly.’ And he goes, ‘And you named him Jack?’ And nd I said, ‘I named HER Jack.’ He loves it now, but at the time, me, I think he was like, ‘That’s hat’s a name for a boy,’ ” she said with a laugh.
The first-time mom took off the last half of 2015 and the first half of 2016 to adapt dapt to life with a little one. Thursday’sursow Sooner Theatre show is actually a rescheduled date from a year ago, when severe evere weather scrapped her spring pring 2015 hometown gig.
“It’s been amazing. She’s the coolest little thing ever,” Keith said. “She’s definitelynitely a mama’s girl, but I can’t blame her for that. I’m with her all day, and she’s breastfed. reastright So we’re besties right now.”
Keith, 30, stirred quitete a
response when she posted a photo on Facebook last month of her breast-feeding her daughter outside their beach house in Mexico. The modest selfie got thousands of responses, mostly positive.
“It wasn’t even really about making a breast-feeding stand. I mean, I’m 100 percent behind breast-feeding, but it was more like it was just a cool moment. I was sitting on the back porch at our house in Cabo and I was breast-feeding her and no one was around. Everyone was asleep … so I was like, ‘Wow, this is the life, being able to look at the ocean and feed her.’ To me, it was really a sweet moment, so I just thought that I’d share that,” she said.
“I honestly didn’t think it would cause the storm that it did, but really, 99.5 percent of people were supportive of it. I just decided I wasn’t going to mention or directly react to the people that were being negative; instead, I’d just … say thanks to my fans that are supporting the decision to breast-feed.”
Getting back to music
Now that she’s getting her rhythm as a parent, Keith said her focus this year is getting back to writing and recording music. She said she plans to spend time in Nashville, Tenn., this summer working on the follow-up to her first album “Whiskey & Lace,” which she released in December 2013 on her father’s Show Dog Universal Music label. From the touching autobiographical ballad “Daddy Dance With Me” to the twangy river-cruising tune “Get Your Redneck On,” her debut won praise for her rich voice and eclectic sound.
“That means that my second album has to be even better than that and have even more depth than the first album, because I have to outdo myself,” she said. “I can’t say that it’s gonna be much different as far as being eclectic, because that’s just my style. I don’t fall into one little area.
“I’ve written a lot for this album. My goal is to end up with more songs that I’ve written than I did the first album. My first album, I think I wrote a third of the songs. So, I’d really love to maybe do at least half the songs on this album.”
Although she doesn’t have a firm timeline, the University of Oklahoma alumna is confident that she will release her sophomore effort at a time when country music is more open to women’s voices and different sounds.
Her first album debuted at the peak of the bro-country trend, when the rockand hip-hop-influenced sound with its down-home lyrics and ball cap-wearing guys dominated country radio and sales, squeezing out all but the top female stars. These days, young women singer-songwriters like Kelsea Ballerini, Cam and Kacey Musgraves are making themselves heard in the format.
“I think it’s definitely more femalefriendly right now than it was when my (first) album came out. The fans started taking note that it really was male-dominated and started pushing back on the radio stations and calling for more females to be supported,” she said.
“And I think it’s leaning back a little bit with Chris Stapleton … when he got his awards and was wildly successful. Not that he’s a new artist, because he’s been around a long time as a writer and artist, but finally getting a mainstream spotlight has been amazing. Because people were like, ‘Oh crap, that’s what country music sounds like; we need more of that,’ and started calling for country to go back to its roots a little bit.”