Erin McKeown Reinterprets the American Songbook

VPM | By Melissa Block

Published February 23, 2007 at 4:58 PM EST

Updated July 7, 2023

Erin McKeown’s last four albums featured her own songs, which blend rock, pop and folk. On her latest CD, Sing You Sinners, she reinterprets American standards.

McKeown first heard “Paper Moon” when a friend played it on a ukulele. Her band then did about six versions, ranging from bluegrass to waltz. “We basically beat up that song until it wasn’t recognizable.” Finally the band took the advice of drummer Allison Miller and settled on a Calypso beat.

For another song, Cole Porter’s “Just One of those Things,” the duality of the lyrics were the motivation. “[He has] this ability to be incredibly ironic and flippant and incredibly sad at the same time,” says McKeown. Unlike Porter, who seems to write off the love affair at the heart of the song, she reinterprets it as an extremely painful experience.

“That’s how I sing it,” she says, “that I’m going to have to get over this thing but honestly can’t.”

McKeown says the album allowed her to be spontaneous, and to take a break from the self-imposed pressure to write her own songs.

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As special correspondent and guest host of NPR's news programs, Melissa Block brings her signature combination of warmth and incisive reporting. Her work over the decades has earned her journalism's highest honors, and has made her one of NPR's most familiar and beloved voices.

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In 2017, she traveled the country for the series "Our Land," visiting a wide range of communities to explore how our identity is shaped by where we live. For that series, she paddled along the Mississippi River, went in search of salmon off the Alaska coast, and accompanied an immigrant family as they became U.S. citizens. Her story about the legacy of the Chinese community in the Mississippi Delta earned her a James Beard Award in 2018.

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Block began her career at NPR in 1985 as an editorial assistant for All Things Considered, and rose through the ranks to become the program's senior producer.

She was a reporter and correspondent in New York from 1994 to 2002, a period punctuated by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Her reporting after those attacks helped earn NPR a George Foster Peabody Award. Block's reporting on rape as a weapon of war in Kosovo was cited by the Overseas Press Club of America in awarding NPR the Lowell Thomas Award in 1999.

Block is a 1983 graduate of Harvard University and spent the following year on a Fulbright fellowship in Geneva, Switzerland. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband — writer Stefan Fatsis — and their daughter.

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