with Niki Barr

By Mike Hume

She’s been described as an Avril Lavigne-type, but less poppy. She’s been said to have the same sound as Alanis Morrisette, but before Alanis stopped being angry. Of course, the qualifying statements could be dropped if publications just realized one absurdly simple truth: Niki Barr is Niki Barr.

As a female rocker, those that describe her are eager to peg her to other more widely-known girl acts, even if their biggest commonality is simply a second X chromosome. Many of the interviews she has done have focused on Barr’s career, not as a rock musician, but as a female rock musician.

“It’s becoming a little cliché, but there’s a sense of female power,” says Barr, 22, a Benton, Md. native. That sense of power comes from the instances where Barr is linked to rock standards like Joan Jett and Chrissie Hynde, whose attitude she admires.

“I don’t want girls my sister’s age (13) to forget about Joan Jett or Chrissie Hynde, those electric guitar, spit-in-your-face rock shows,” Barr says. “I don’t want them to think that all female musicians have to be like Avril Lavigne or Michelle Branch.”

The problem with that Barr’s path towards Jett and Hynde trends away from the modern media mainstream, and makes large-scale exposure that much harder to obtain.

“People see a certain formula that sells, and because of that we lose out on people that write music from the heart. The days of Led Zeppelin are almost gone,” Barr, who covers Zeppelin’s ‘The Ocean,’ laments. “The question is becoming, ‘Is this artist going to make me a lot of money?’”

MCA thought Barr could do just that for the label after a recording session with The Matrix and The Wizards of Oz in Los Angeles … but a little tweaking couldn’t hurt. At the time, Pink was the hot girl act, and MCA wanted its own version of A&R’s budding cash cow.

“That was the first real shocker, to hear someone tell me to be something different,” Barr says. “I was 20 at the time and I told them ‘no way.’”

That was the path she chose. But it’s her path. She wants to make it big, of course, but she wants to make it on her terms, with her music.

“I believe that writing your own material is the best thing in the industry,” she says. “It’s been a real uphill battle here. I’m in a genre that’s not very popular. It’s so testosterone driven that most women either have to go the pop route or just stick it out and hope for the best.”

That’s part of the reason that Barr is planning an extensive tour in the United Kingdom, where her sound has been more widely accepted and her new album Lush is on the “A” playlist on ARFM (Sky 913).

Barr is no stranger to playing abroad. Some of her first tours took her out of the country before her 20th birthday, playing to U.S. troops stationed in Asia and Europe.

“It was nice because I wasn’t even of legal drinking age but we could go bar hopping,” Barr jokes.

She’ll play the State Theatre, Oct. 6 before heading abroad again, seeking to make her own way and avoid conforming to the prevalent mold that has pinned her peers to the pop genre.

“When it comes to promoting, people think females can't rock because they don’t have the balls,” Barr says. “In that sense [the female rocker label] stinks because people discount you. But I don’t mind. I am what I am and people are going to have to deal with it.