Gillian Grassie – Singer Songwriter Harpist

West Coast Adventures

// May 14th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Performances, Press, Travel

It’s a cloudy, early morning in San Francisco, and I’m sitting in the kitchen with the day’s first cup of coffee, listening to a quiet house.

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!

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).

…Like in the Moving Pictures!

// February 12th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Performances, Press

Video cameras are cruel and unforgiving creatures, but I’ve braved the cyclops on a few occasions in the past few weeks and done a bit of filming. Since it’ll likely be a few more weeks of editing before anything gets posted online, I thought I’d share some behind-the-scenes still photographs from the shoots with you.

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!

Counting the Places I’ve Laid My Head: 2010 in Numbers

// January 14th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, News, Travel

2010 was an immense year for me on many fronts, marking both the bulk of my Watson Fellowship experience as well as my first national tour. I’ve been struggling with how best to approach a year-end retrospective. Since most of my blog posts tend to be longwinded affairs and because January is supposed to be about both fresh starts and self-reflection, I’ve decided to examine the year 2010 in numbers, maps, and graphs. Mind you, I’ve never worked so hard to suck at anything in my life in quite the same way as Calculus, so this has been a bold undertaking. My rules in arriving at the figures below were that a location only counts if I spent at least one night there. Places I passed through in transit do not count. Enjoy!

Here’s a nifty google map marking the stops on my journey:

(You can view a larger version of this map with all the cities listed & twitter excerpts narrating each location!)

I thought it’d be fun to break down all that travel by modes of transport. The mile estimates, especially in terms car travel, err on the modest end of the spectrum. I actually put 16,000 miles on my car during the three months of the North American tour, but for the purposes of this blog post I was only calculating direct distances between cities. I didn’t feel that I could accurately track the miles I logged by autorickshaw in India, so, sadly, the long, hot, stinky, noisy, fume-filled hours I spent squashed under my harp & fearing for my imminent demise in those three-wheeled, two-stroke wonders of modern transport are not included.

miles traveled in various modes of transport. Notably, most of those bus miles were logged in Indonesia.

While my carbon-guilt is great for having flown over 13,000 miles, I was slightly mollified to learn that I actually logged MORE miles by public transport (those 600+ miles spent on boats & ferry’s really sealed the deal). The grand total for miles travelled in 2010? 39,155

Other Facts & Figures

Continents Visited: 3
Countries Visited: 9
Cities Visited: 79
U.S. States Visited: 28
Languages Spoken (mostly very badly): 8
Currencies Held: 8
Hospital Visits: 2 (one for rabies post-exposure treatment in Indonesia, the other for a mystery virus in India)
Passports Stolen: 2
Consular Interventions on My Behalf: 1 (Thanks for getting me out of Russia, Wilma!)
Human-sized Hampster Balls oggled in Tyumen: 1

Now, I know this is a far cry from the wizardry of an OkCupid Trends post, but cut me some slack, okay? I was a Comparative Literature major! That said, if there are other calculations you’d like me to try and approximate, I’m open to giving it all of my XKCD-loving spirit.

Happy New Year!
-Gillian

Announcing The Do it Auf Deutsch Tour

// September 2nd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Performances, Travel

I’ve been abroad so long I’m afraid I’ve neglected my North American lovelies – so I’m hitting the road!

From September through November, I’ll be driving all over this great land, from coast to coast, to play for you in venues, coffee shops, bookstores, cafés, art collectives, basements and living rooms.

I’ve booked part of this beast, but there is much that remains to be confirmed. Anyone enthusiastic enough to organize a concert in their town/college/home, put me and my harp up for the night, or help with promotion will have my everlasting adoration. Also, I make excellent gratitude-omelettes.

Here’s my itinerary (details for confirmed dates are under the SHOWS tab):

SEPTEMBER

9/5 New York, NY – Joe’s Pub – 7 PM
9/6 Cambridge, MA – Club Passim (Campfire Festival!) 4: 15 PM
9/7 North Kingstown, RI – Beach Concert! – 6 PM
9/8 Danbury, CT – Cousin Larry’s Café – 9 PM
9/11 Montpelier, VT – Langdon Street Café – 7 PM
9/12 Burlington, VT – Parima – 7:30 PM
9/19 Toronto, Canada – Tranzac – 10:30 PM

OCTOBER
*updated

10/1 Philadelphia, PA – House Concert – 7 PM
10/3 Washington, DC – IOTA Club & Cafe – 8:30 PM
10/5 Lynchburg, VA – The White Hart – 7 PM
10/7 Greensboro, NC – The Greenleaf @ Guilford college – 8PM
10/9 Lexington, KY – Common Grounds – 7 PM
10/11 Nashville, TN – The Bluebird Café open mic – 7 PM
10/13 Gainesville, FL – The Civic Media Center – 9:30 PM
10/14 New Orleans, LA – Neutral Grounds – 11 PM
10/16 New Orleans, LA – House Concert – 7 PM
10/18 Austin, TX – House Concert – e-mail for details
10/19 Norman, OK – House Concert – e-mail for details
10/23 Los Angeles, CA – Genghis Cohen – 7:30 PM
10/28 San Francisco, CA – The Red Poppy Art Center – 7 PM

NOVEMBER

11/2 Portland, OR – The Knife – 9 PM
11/3 Victoria, BC, Canada – opening for Kuba Oms – details TBA
11/4 Seattle, WA – Hibdo – 8 PM
11/10 Aspen, CO – House Concert – e-mail for details
11/10 Boulder, CO – Cafe Sole – 5-7 PM
11/14 Chicago, IL – Northwestern University Masterclass & Concert – 5 PM
*****11/17 Philadelphia, PA – World Café Live NYSC Showcase – 7 PM*****
**UPDATE! Due to extenuating personal circumstances, I will NOT be hosting the SongCircle showcase on November 17th, but Suzie Brown will be covering for me and the show is definitely still on. I’ll return to host the next showcase on January 12th**

As you can see, there is much of my itinerary that is still, shall we say, malleable? Take a look at the accompanying Google Maps and if you’ve got an idea that fits the general trajectory, I’d love to discuss it! Please share this with your friends and family and help spread the word. This is an independent, grassroots, fan-fueled (ad)venture, and I can’t do it without you.

fill my heart, fill my gas tank, fill my belly… I’ll see you on the road!

Love,
Gillian

* *Europe! I’m coming for you in the Spring, darling. I plan to pass some of those long hours on the highway this fall spinning German tapes and trying to learn the language of Rilke and Marlene Dietrech (hence the tour title). Quiz me when I’m back!

September

October

November

NBC Philadelphia 10! Show Performance

// August 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Performances

Thanks so much to the wonderful folks over at the 10! Show for having me back. Chris Coyle joined me on upright bass for a new song, “Borrowed or Begged.”

Serpentine spinning on more US airwaves

// March 10th, 2010 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, News

Totally thrilled to learn that the number of stations spinning Serpentine in the US has doubled since December. Many of these triple A stations, including Public Radio East, have moved the album into heavy rotation because of your requests – thanks!

I’ll try to hit as many of these cities as I can on my Fall tour, but if there’s a specific venue or town you’d like me to visit, shoot me an e-mail at info@gilliangrassie.com. And remember, you can always book me for a concert right in your own living room – anyone can do it! I love playing house concerts.

You can now catch songs from Serpentine playing on the following stations:

AOL Radio National
KXCI Tucson AZ
KOZT Ft. Bragg CA
KWMR Pt. Reyes Station CA
KCMV Breckinridge CO
KDNK Carbondale CO
KBUT Crested Butte CO
KSUT Ignacio CO
KVNF Paonia CO
WFIT Melbourne FL
KKCR Hanalei HI
KDEC Decorah IA
WFHB Bloomington IN
WWHR Bowling Green KY
WFPK Louisville KY
WMKY Moorehead KY
KSLU Hammond LA
WTMD Baltimore MD
Maine Public Broadcasting Bangor ME
WERU E. Orland ME
KAXE Grand Rapids MN
WSGE Charlotte NC
Public Radio East New Bern NC
WNTI Hackettstown NJ
WBJB Monmouth NJ
WFDU Teaneck NJ
Indie SF Santa Fe NM
WEXT Albany NY
WEHM Long Island NY
WDST Woodstock NY
WOUB Athens OH
WCBE Columbus OH
WYSO Yellow Springs OH
KRVM Eugene OR
WDIY Bethlehem PA
WXPN Philadelphia PA
WVIA Scranton PA
WETS Johnson City TN
KFAN Fredericksburg TX
KPFT Houston TX add
KUT Austin TX
KWCR Ogden UT
KRCL Salt Lake City UT
WNRN Charlotesville VA
WRRW Williamsburg VA
Wyoming Public Laramie WY

Serpentine getting spins across the United States!

// December 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Press

Thanks so much to the following AAA stations for giving Serpentine airtime:

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