Ramblers being silly

Before we take off for Ecuador, I wanted to give you all some highlights of our amazing week in Colombia.

BUCARAMANGA

We began our journey in Bucaramanga, where we were met by our effervescent cultural co-ordinater from Bi-National Center, Juliana. We hit the ground running with a workshop at the Escuela Normal Superior with two big classes of enthusiastic (and energetic!) students. We worked off some of that energy by having them jump, walk, run, swim, drive, & ride around the verbs of motion in Old Joe Clark, & then learned some interesting noises for animals in both Colombia & the United States during Old MacDonald. I especially liked learning about the Chiguiro! Also, I’m always excited for the opportunity to showcase my super-realistic chicken sound, cultivated over many afternoons of serious practice as a child. In between the classes, we were offered a refreshing carbonated beverage called Malta that looked for all the world like cola, but tasted like a dead ringer for the milk in your bowl post-Lucky Charms. Brendan, Matt, Jordan, I were reminded of our time in Russia at the end of the class when all the kids rushed us for autographs & facebook contact info.

Jordan strikes a teacherly pose...

We were delighted to discover that the venue for our first public concert was the stunning Casa del Libro Total Museum & were well-received by the audience there. Our program ranged from rousing songs about Union scabbers (“Casey Jones”), to ballads about the hardships of growing up in poverty in the Appalachian Mountains (Ola Bella Reed’s “I’ve Endured” & Gillian Welch’s “Red Clay Halo”), to songs about the railroad (“John Henry”) and the range (“Home on the Range”) and heartache (“East Virginia”), to silly children’s songs (“The Fox”), and examples of “contemporary American folk music” when Brendan, Jordan, & I each take a turn playing original compositions. I also like to throw in a traditional Irish song called “The Blackbird,” which provides a good opportunity to introduce the idea of The United States as a nation of immigrants & talk about the relationship between some of the traditional music in America & that of the British Isles.

sound check at the museum

One of the main ideas behind this project is that, in addition to being a fun way for ESL students to learn through music, we feel that traditional American folk music is a terrific way to share another side of American culture that is perhaps not very well represented by our most pervasive cultural exports (Hollywood films, pop music, MTV, etc). The United States is a vast & complex nation filled with many different people with rich & varied heritage. The stories told in Folk songs are stories about real people, ordinary people, about hardship & joy & suffering & history, & we are as excited about sharing these narratives of American culture with other parts of the world as we are about learning more about the lives & history of our hosts & the students & teachers we encounter.

Matt & Gillian ramble through the streets of Bucaramanga

One of the ways that we like to explore new cultures is through food! Brendan in particular has made it his mission to taste every local specialty cuisine he encounters, which is how we came to sit around a small plastic table, contemplating a bag of fried ants. The ants were much larger than any I’d ever seen – each abdomen section about the size of a small pea – and (I can personally report) are crunchy, salty, & not altogether unpleasant save for the disturbingly tangible legs, which got stuck between my teeth.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dvFXwcT4uo&w=425&h=349]

After two wonderful, busy days that ended too soon, we packed our bags once again & caught a flight back to Bogota & then to Pereira (interesting fact: we will pass through the Bogota airport three times on this trip without ever actually seeing the capital city itself! Guess that means we’ll have to come back soon for a proper visit). Next update: Pereira!

revisiting a favorite Russian card game

morning run by the golden gate bridge

I’ve been staying with some friends in Outer Richmond this past week to rehearse with the ESL Folk Project in preparation for our tour in South America. I met Matt, Brendan, & Jordan last summer in Tomsk where we began our first tour, bringing a special program using American Folk music as a cultural supplement for students learning English in Russia. The U.S. State Department loved the project so much, they decided to fund us again for a month-long tour in Colombia, Peru, & Ecuador. It’s the first time that we’ve all been together since Ufa last summer & the reunion has been sweet indeed. Tomorrow morning we’ll catch an early flight to Bogata the adventure begins! We expect to be doing some blogging updates from the road, but I don’t know how regular our internet access will be, so I wanted to write a little post sharing some of the highlights of my past couple weeks in California.

Oh, hey there, Hollywood

I flew to Los Angeles on April 29th to visit my dear friend Rosy, who had generously offered to host a house concert for me. We spent the weekend cooking & then celebrated May Day with music, a feast featuring dishes from all the countries I’ll be visiting on the ESL Folk tour, & over a hundred guests.

That there's 70lbs of onions. I cried.

On Monday, fellow Fellow Ted & I visited the Caltech campus to talk about our recent experiences as Thomas J. Watson Fellows on a panel for prospective applicants. Here’s hoping one of their many intriguing proposal ideas gets funded next year! We drove down to San Diego & spent a couple days learning ridiculous covers on harp & guitar, playing them for dear distant friends on Skype, & sampling the finest fish taco stands in the city. Ted also treated me with a breakfast of matzo brie, which is kind of like Jewish French toast (and totally delicious).

Ted! You made Matzo Brie!

I took the train up from SD back to LA (and, as always when traveling public transit with my harp, talked to lots of curious strangers) & then caught a rideshare to San Francisco with a woman who managed to fit me, my harp (in flight crate), & a young australian woman fresh from the airport into her Prius! I was dropped off in the Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood just in time to play another house concert for a super fun audience featuring a surprising number of AmeriCorps volunteers. By midnight, I’d made my weary way to Outer Richmond where the ESL Folk Project has been living & rehearsing this past week.

Brendan, Matt, & Jordan

We’ve been working hard, logging several 9 hour days of solid rehearsal, learning lots of new material & lesson plans for the students we are *super* excited to meet in Peru, Colombia, & Ecuador. This time around, the U.S. State Department is organizing several large public concerts in addition to our schedule with the schools, so we’ve put together an entirely new program! Some of my favorites to learn have been John Henry, Red Clay Halo, Old Joe Clark, In the Pines, & Casey Jones.

lots of lyrics-learning...

In our spare time, we’ve managed to share several delicious meals (Jordan’s a wizard with a cast iron skillet) & visit the Sutro Baths, a 19th Century swimming facility that now lies in ruins on the Pacific Coast, not far from the house where we’ve been staying. When not making a hootenanny in the living room with the guys, I’ve also been learning cover song requests from a kickstarter campaign for my next solo album, locking myself in the (acoustically pleasing & quiet) bathroom to make iMovie recordings, & posting them on YouTube. One of the covers, a version of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Theme on harp, was picked up by the online gaming community & went viral, making this one of the most viewed bathrooms in San Francisco! Big love & thanks to Reddit.com, RipTen.com, Kotaku.com, The Elder Scrolls facebook & twitter feeds, bit-tech.net, & thousands of individuals for spreading the video like wildfire. I stayed up late last night learning the Ultima Online Theme (which was one of the earliest follow-up requests from Reddit.com) & posted it on YouTube this morning as a gesture of my deep gratitude for the outpouring of support that’s come from the gaming community over the past few days.

over 42,000 people have seen this bathroom!

We’ve already started getting some press coverage in South America, like this article: Ramblin’ Across the Andes.. Time to get back to packing – looking forward to sharing our stories from the road!

Much love,
-Gillian

sorry, Pickles, you can't come...

P.S. My next concerts in the U.S. will be on Monday, June 13th at the Rockwood Music Hall in NYC & Saturday, June 18th at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia. The Tin Angel shows have been selling out, so if you’re interested in coming, be sure to reserve your tickets in advance!

On May 1st, the kickstarter campaign passed its $10,000 goal, covering the costs of professional radio promotion when The Hinter Haus is released. Yesterday, you exceeded expectations again by pushing me over the $12,000 mark & additionally securing a publicist! If we reach $15,000 by the close of funding at 11 PM EST on May 14th, I’ve promised to run pressings of the album in both CD & Vinyl format.

There are now 124 unbelievably generous & amazing backers involved in this project who are living in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Senegal, China, France, Ireland, Italy, Sri Lanka, & Australia! It’s incredibly exciting to me that these songs, which were conceived during a time of international travel & exploration, are now receiving support from people in so many parts of the world.

I started posting the YouTube cover requests that have come through on the campaign this week. One of them – an adaptation of The Elder Scrolls Morrowind Theme – has gone viral with over 18,000 hits in its first day! There is a new, soft, warm place in my heart reserved for the RPG community. Thanks to Mike, Reddit.com, RipTen.com, & the Elder Scrolls fb & twitter pages for passing the video around!

Please continue sharing this project with your friends by posting the kickstarter link on your facebook wall, twitter feed, blog, or e-mail list. If you’ve already done this & haven’t yet received your copy of “Borrowed or Begged,” please just give me a heads up on facebook, twitter, or at gillian [at] gilliangrassie.com & I’ll send you the download link.

As excited as I am by the ambitious figure we’ve managed to raise together, it’s important to remember that this campaign is not only about fundraising, but also reaching new listeners. Every friend you share this with is another potential fan, which is every bit as valuable to me as each dollar contributed to this project.

It is thrilling (and a little overwhelming) to have had such a positive response to this record so quickly.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Love,
Gillian

Q&A with Cassie Towler for Gwynedd-Mercy College
February 1st, 2011

What is your hometown?

I was born in Philadelphia and raised in Germantown. When I was five, my family moved to a farm in Southern Chester County. I went through the Unionville-Chadds Ford School district except for my sophomore year of high school, when I lived in Lausanne, Switzerland. I moved back to Philly when I finished high school because of the excellent singer-songwriter scene there, and then a couple years later decided to go to Bryn Mawr College (another school with a consonant-heavy, Welsh name!)

What age did you become interested in music?

I don’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t singing. When I was a kid, I was involved in the Kennett Symphony Children’s Choir and several regional and national ACDA honors choirs. Through these groups I was able to learn a lot about musical phrasing, sight-reading, and ear training, and gained performance experience in some amazing venues like Symphony Hall in Boston and the National Cathedral. Later, I studied the bel canto vocal technique with a private teacher for several years. I was fascinated by the harp from the age of three but had to wait almost a decade before I got my first harp lesson. I fell in love with the instrument immediately and was pretty serious about pursuing music professionally by the time I started high school.

What made you choose the harp?

You know how some little kids just come out horse-crazy? I was like that only instead of begging my parents for a pony every year I was pleading for a harp.

How long have you been playing the harp/ performing?

I’ve been playing the harp for about twelve years and performing music for most of my life. I started writing songs when I was fifteen after being exposed to the poetry of Philip Larkin in school and some pretty innovative Jazz and avant garde artists at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival. I shifted gears from playing mostly Celtic and Classical music to performing original music as a singer-songwriter when I was eighteen.

What or who is the biggest influence on your music?

I remember my dad playing me a vinyl record of Joni Mitchell’s Court & Spark in the attic and being instantly smitten. If I’m on a desert island and allowed only one catalogue of music for the rest of my life, it’d be Joni’s. My grandfather played loads of big band recordings, which is where I get a lot of my jazz leanings. I also find Björk, Patty Griffin, & Billie Holiday very inspiring. My harp influences (for the harp nerds out there) include Park Stickney, Catriona McKay, Corrina Hewat, & Rüdiger Opperman, though I also spend a lot of time imitating or adapting guitar, piano, & bass approaches from my favorite singer-songwriters.

What is the best thing about being a performer? The worst thing?

The best thing about being a performer is the performance itself. I am probably most comfortable and happiest when I’m on stage giving a concert. I love traveling, discovering new cities, and meeting people on the road. There’s something very special about live performance that makes concerts such a different experience from listening to recorded music. I like how an audience and the musician(s) create the show together; it’s a collaborative event and as a result, no two concerts are ever the same. When everyone is engaged, it can be a very intimate experience. It’s like a hundred people falling in love with each other, hard, all in the same moment. That’s some powerful stuff.

The worst thing about being a performer is that I spend about 80% of my time behind a laptop and only 20% actually making music. Putting together a tour is only a little bit about playing shows – the bigger picture is hundreds or even thousands of e-mails researching venues, networking with other artists, booking & promoting dates, setting up radio interviews, & keeping your fanbase engaged through mailing list blasts, facebook, twitter, and other social media updates. The reality of being an independent musician today is that you have to wear a lot of hats, and not all of them fit very well. I’m really grateful for my liberal arts degree because most of my job as a musician is actually writing, whether it’s blog updates, press releases, or songs.

How did you become involved in the ESL Folk project? Do you find it rewarding?

I received a 2009-2010 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which funded me to take my harp through Europe and Asia and study emerging music scenes for a year. I was supposed to go to Japan after China, but my harp’s flight case had been broken by an airline when I left India. I’d managed to travel with just ground transport since Hong Kong, but I wasn’t sure how I’d be getting the harp home from Japan. Luckily, my friend Brendan Mulvihill had been living in Siberia, working as an English Teacher’s Assistant at a university in Tomsk and he and another Fulbright ETA put together this ESL Folk Project tour as a cultural supplement for Russian kids learning English. They got funding from the State Department and the Fulbright program and invited me to come along, which worked out great logistically because it meant that I could continue traveling by train/bus/boat as far as Berlin, where I had friends who could look after the harp for me until I was able to get a new flight case. In the end, there were four of us musicians traveling around on trains to parts of Russia not often visited by Americans, with a harp, banjo, guitar, and mandolin in tow. It was one of the highlights of my year abroad and I’m excited that we’ve been funded to do a similar project in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador this May!

What is your favorite band?

Right now I’m spinning a lot of Elbow, Anais Mitchell, The National, Gillian Welch, The Low Anthem, Ryan Adams, The Notwist, and Radiohead on my iPod. You can go ahead and make fun of me for only really discovering Radiohead in 2009. I’m often out of the pop culture loop. Such are the perils of growing up as a harp-obsessed teenager on a farm without television. Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown folk-opera is maybe the most musically satisfying thing I’ve heard recently.

Any advice for young aspiring musicians?

Go to open mic nights, test out new material, and pay attention to the audience – they’ll let you know what’s working and what’s not. I think it’s really important to get performance experience because as soon as you’re playing in front of other people and asking them to buy tickets/CDs/merch/etc, the whole thing has to become at least as much about them as it is about you. Make sure you set up a website (you can do this for free through tumblr, wordpress, or other blogging sites) and bring a mailing list with you EVERY time. This is how you’ll build your fan base. Treat every e-mail address like gold. Also, be friendly, courteous, and kind. You never know when some random person you meet might be in a position to give you a leg up or connect you with an amazing opportunity. Also be respectful of the fact that music venues are businesses. Book smaller rooms and co-bill with other acts to distribute the responsibility of “draw” (the number of audience members you bring into the room) until you’re ready to play a venue with a larger capacity.

Also, be prepared to kind of suck for a while. It’s sort of like when you’re learning a foreign language, and you reach that painful point where you’ve finally gotten fluent enough to realize how bad you are. What’s important at this moment is not to give up. Every person doing creative work goes through a period where their abilities don’t live up to their aspirations, and what separates the folks who do eventually become really good from those who don’t is the perseverance to get through this adolescence. It can take years. Don’t expect it to be any less awkward than middle school.

If you don’t believe me, take it from Ira Glass (in an interview he did with OpenCulture.com).

I spent the last weekend of January in NYC working with Jazeel Gayle on a music video for Silken String. We built an enormous tent out of satin ribbon, kind of like a may pole sans the phallic fertility symbol. In case you were wondering what 50 yards worth of ribbon looks like, this is it:

I don’t want give too much away before the video comes out, but here are a couple other images from the shoot:

The other shoot I did was a taping for a new NBC Philadelphia series called Inside the Music Box. Gabriel Antonini invited me to come by the NBC Philadelphia studios, play a couple songs and give an interview. Filming always makes me nervous, but I really had a blast working with these guys.

I’ll let you know when the final products are posted online and ready for prime time.

P.S. Notice anything different? I’ve started playing standing up!

First up, tonight I’ll be joining Ranjit Barot on stage at Blue Frog.

Friday, I’ll be performing with Indian fusion band Mithaavin as a part of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival.

(Details on the SHOWS page)

The Bombay Elektrik Project gigs at Cafe Goa got some nice coverage in the blogosphere. Check out what folks had to say at desictritics, indiecision, and the Mumbai Mirror.

KXCI Tucson AZ
KCMV Breckenridge CO
KDNK Carbondale CO
KVNF Paonia CO
WFIT Melbourne FL
KKCR Hanalei HI
KDEC Decorah IA
WFPK Louisville KY
WMKY Moorehead KY
WTMD Baltimore MD
MPBN Bangor ME
WERU E. Orland ME
WNTI Hackettstown NJ
Indie SF Santa Fe NM
WEXT Albany NY
WDST Woodstock NY
WCBE Columbus OH
WXPN Philadelphia PA (these guys have been backing me for years…Thanks XPN!)
WVIA Scranton PA
WETS Johnson City TN
KFAN Fredericksburg TX
KPFT Houston TX
WNRN Charlottesville VA
WRRW Williamsburg VA

Most of these are public radio stations, which means they operate at least in part via member support. Consider making a (typically tax-deductible) donation to help keep your local station up and running and bringing you independent music.

Thanks and happy holidays! (next up: a blog about Mumbai, finally…)

-Gillian

Thank you Erica Phillips!

The band and I will be performing just ONE song, and picking favorite songs is like picking favorite children… so I thought I’d let you decide! Cast your vote for the song you’d most like to hear from Serpentine by commenting on Myspace or Facebook by Tuesday (shall we say midnight?) and then tune in to see what song got the most votes.

Groovy?

Much Love,
Gillian

P.S. You can still get a free song by joining the mailing list at gilliangrassie.fanbridge.com. Just look for the link in your confirmation e-mail. This will be the best way to keep updated on my travels in the coming year.

XPN is available on the following radio frequencies and worldwide at www.xpn.org:

* WXPN 88.5 FM in the greater Philadelphia/South Jersey area
* 104.9 FM in the Lehigh Valley
* 90.5 FM Worton/Baltimore
* 88.7 FM Lancaster/York
* 99.7 FM Harrisburg
* WXPN is also available worldwide via streaming audio.