Gillian Grassie – Singer Songwriter Harpist

Q&A with Cassie Towler

// March 1st, 2011 // No Comments » // Press

Last month I gave an e-mail interview to Cassie Towler for the Gwynedd-Mercy College student newspaper before a performance on campus at their coffee house. I thought the questions she asked might be of interest to others too and wanted to share our exchange with you. I’ve also been answering questions through FanBridge, the site that manages my mailing list – feel free to ask your own question there!

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).