Not Just Another Girl with a Guitar: Deidre Muro Makes Music Her Business

I woke up early this morning,

Didn't know who I was,

Your heavy head still on my pillow.

You exhale, stale with alcohol.

If someone had told me that this is how

Love would all go down,

('Cause it's going down)

Then they may have saved me from your touch.

-Deidre Muro, "Red Afternoon"

Standing onstage with her guitar and sipping a rum and coke, a faint smile spreads across Deidre Muro's face as the spotlight fades. Halfway through her set at the East Village's Sidewalk Cafe, the last notes of her brooding reflections on lost love seem to hang in the air for a moment before rising applause takes over the candlelit room.

"One of the coolest things about playing music in front of a crowd is the ability to shut up a room," Muro said over coffee and a bagel at Cafe Pick Me Up a few days before the show. "When I play 'Red Afternoon,' sometimes it's scary how quiet the room gets. Suddenly everyone is on the same page with me."

Muro, a recent New York University graduate, is a petite girl with short brown hair, a disarming smile and a big voice that belies her small stature. She channels the singing voice of Ella Fitzgerald, the songwriting of Jeff Buckley and the soul of Muddy Waters, all with the help of her longtime backing band. But Muro said not to confuse her with those Michelle Branch/Ani DiFranco "girl with a guitar" types spreading their white noise all over the radio.

"I hate the term 'singer-songwriter,' " she said. "Even though I suppose that's what I am, and I'm not trying to hide that. But it's become a genre, and as a genre, it's so stuck in whiny, lame-ass acoustic shit. I like to think I'm more varied than that."

Muro was raised in Smithtown, Long Island, by a mother who is a church organist and choir director and a father who is a longtime writer and teacher on the subject of synthesizers and electronic music. As a result, Muro grew up with a love of music, attending her mother's choir practices as a baby and later joining at the age of seven. She also watched every movie musical she could find - including her favorites by Rogers & Hammerstein - and sang those same tunes for hours while her father accompanied on piano.