People ask me, if you could rewind the tape, would you do it different? I tell them, f*** no. If I'd played it safe, drunk chamomile, and gone to bed before midnight, I wouldn't be me. If I hadn't smashed a piano in a basement in Shoreditch and hot-wired a broken Korg in a motel off I-80, none of this would've happened. Look, if the lights go out tomorrow, I can't complain. I've eaten cold noodles on rooftops in Osaka, played ruined factories in Detroit with snow coming through the rafters, married the wrong person and the right person. I've done good and I've done awful. But I'm not done yet.
At seventy, Mara Kline—the Locksmith of Noise, the patron saint of broken synths—was halfway through her victory-lap tour, City of Shattered Key, packing out halls from the Fillmore to Funkhaus and drawing reviews that read like love letters. Then catastrophe. In a matter of weeks, a splinter from a century-old Steinway lodged in her finger turned septic; an infection the size of a coin burrowed toward her spine. What began as a bandaged knuckle became surgeries, a cervical fusion, and a white room in St Thomas' with a view of the Thames and near-total paralysis below the collarbone. The road cases went quiet. The CP-70 gathered dust. The applause stopped—so did the texts.
City of Shattered Key is the shocking, mordantly funny, never-before-told account of Kline's fall and fight. With reporter Zara Chen at her elbow and a tape recorder always clicking, Kline carves through five decades: East Cleveland church basements and squats in Hackney; the night "Black Chapel" reunited in Lisbon and she wished they hadn't; a marriage to sculptor Rafael Ko that burned like magnesium; an affair with a tour manager who collected motel key fobs and carried a bent Allen key in his sock; love, grudges, and the cost of staying loud. There are 3 a.m. kebabs in Kreuzberg with Gideon Crowe, tequila sunrises in Tijuana with DJ Lazúr, an onstage fistfight with Blitz Fancher over a cigarette-burned Rhodes, and a dawn drive through Nevada after Nita Kravye threw a Prophet-5 out the van. There is the hospice in Cluj where Old Marius, her first mentor, asked for one last chord and she made the ward sing.
Unflinching, brutally candid, and—against the odds—life-affirming, City of Shattered Key shows how Kline outgrew every tag thrust upon her—"godmother of the rust age," "wrecking angel of the piano"—to become a folk hero with a soldering iron, a national treasure in leather boots, and proof that you can build a city from broken keys and still find your way home.
