Music: Voegele Training

There are so many elements of Kate Voegele’s actual career that seem lifted from a screenplay about a young woman’s meteoric rise from obscurity to stardom that it’s not surprising in the least that she recently played that fictional role on the CW’s One Tree Hill. It is a gross understatement to say the Cleveland native and one-time Miami University student has traveled a fairly amazing path in a relatively short time, and yet she remains atypically grounded.

“I’m just folding some laundry,” Voegele says by phone, in the midst of chores on her first headlining tour. “When you’re on the road and you have to live out of a suitcase, it’s kind of essential, you know.”

The January reissue of her hit 2007 album, Don’t Look Away on MySpace Records (an upstream Universal imprint), her brief TV gig as Mia on One Tree Hill and her current top-of-the-marquee tour are all the culmination of an incredible five-year ride for the 21-year-old singer/songwriter. Voegele grew up in Cleveland and absorbed the music in the surroundings provided by her musician/collector father and vocalist mother, eventually learning guitar and writing her first song at 15.

“It’s one of those things that I was always around,” Voegele says of her musical environment. “I was in choir at school and the church choir. My dad’s a musician not by trade but sort of as a hobby. When he was in high school, he played in bands, and he’s a great songwriter and he taught me a lot about that.

He was a great influence on me, for sure.”

In an impossibly short year, Voegele progressed to the point where she recorded some demos with her father, who sent them out to a few industry types. The response was immediate and overwhelming. At 16, Voegele was tapped to open regional shows for the John Mayer/Counting Crows 2003 summer shed tour, which led Voegele to accept a number of other high-profile experiences, including opening gigs for Patty Griffin, Aimee Mann, Dave Matthews and Howie Day, and appearances at Farm-Aid, SXSW, Summerfest and CMJ. She also took the top prizes in the New York Songwriters’ Circle (for “I Won’t Disagree”) and the USA Songwriting Contest (for “Only Fooling Myself”), both of which appear on Don’t Look Away.

“That’s what’s been so bizarre about this whole experience for me,” Voegele says. “I’m always cutting my teeth in the spotlight. I’m learning how to do whatever it is I’m doing, but I’m doing it in front of a bunch of people. I spent a lot of high school kind of skeptical about whether or not I even had a shot at this. Being from a tiny suburb of Cleveland, growing up in a nice family, I liked my friends, I liked high school, and I didn’t have any crazy sob story to tell a record label and that’s what I kept feeling like they were looking for. So those opening and side-stage slots were surreal for me, because I sort of felt like I’d won a contest in a way.

“It didn’t seem like legitimate opportunities to me until I started getting calls from labels and managers, and I realized, ‘Oh my God, maybe I could make a career of this.’ ”

After recording some more professional demos in L.A. with veteran producer Marshall Altman and entertaining label offers, Voegele enrolled at Miami.

“My parents both went there and a lot of my good friends from high school loved it and wanted to go,” Voegele says. “My thing about Miami was that it’s such the epitome of a college town and a college experience. I was between Miami and NYU, but I knew that when I went to college I was not going to finish at that time, because I knew I was going to go out and pursue my music career. But I decided that when I do go to college I really want to have that college experience and Miami’s the perfect place for that.”

It was also the place where Voegele planted the seeds for success she’s had with Don’t Look Away. She worked plenty of local gigs into her school schedule, which gave her an expanding fan base well before she’d recorded professionally or inked a deal.

“I played Uptown all the time, which was awesome,” says Voegele. “It was the perfect audience. It was kind of a good career move going to school because it got people my age familiar with my music and they’d go home and tell their friends, people from all over the U.S. So it was beneficial, even though that wasn’t my intention. It just accidentally ended up being a great thing.”

Tagged by an early A&R rep as a “commercial Patty Griffin,” Voegele has approached her music and her career with a great deal of maturity and savvy. She shrugged off major-label deals where she felt manipulation lurking in the wings and accepted the MySpace offer because it afforded her creative freedom. It’s proven to be a successful strategy: Voegele is in the Top 10 on the iTunes Album Chart and on Billboard’s Independent Album and Top Digital Album Charts.

And she’s still learning.

“I could never be one of those door-to-door people, who convinces people to buy things they don’t need,” Voegele says. “It was hard for me at first to sell this music, even though I felt like people did need it and that I had something to say. With each of those shows, especially those early ones, I learned the techniques of what it means to be an opening act and how to draw people in. It took some time, and it wasn’t like I was playing in front of 15 people, I was opening for these big acts and learning at the same time. It was kind of crazy.”

This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2008.