I grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. and lived in Philadelphia during my college years. I moved back to the D.C. area for graduate school, and ended up staying here for work.
I'm currently an English professor and directing a writing program at a small liberal arts college in Maryland. But, my passion is music.
I started writing lyrics as a teenager, but I didn't start putting lyrics and music together until college. Like millions of other girls before me, Joni Mitchell's Blue had a huge impact on me. I was floored--and quite frankly, terrified--by how honest she was in her music. One thing that Joni has said about songwriting that's stuck with me is that it's like "peeling the layers of your own onion." I guess it was really in my early twenties that I started wanting to "peel my own onion" and use songwriting to understand myself better. Unfortunately, I didn't find that I had much to say at that age, so I stopped writing for a few years. Now that I'm a little older (though certainly no wiser), I feel like I have more to contribute, and songwriting is how I make sense of what's going on in my head.
I'm still trying to find my sound. I'm influenced by so many things--folk, new age, electronica, pop, indie, metal, prog--that I have a hard time thinking of my work as part of any particular genre. The songs kind of tell me where they want to go. They ask for certain arrangements, instrumentations, lyric changes. It also helps to have a great collaborator. Part of my writing and recording process is creating different versions of the same song to figure out what does (and doesn't) work.
Recently, the stars have finally aligned in a lot of practical ways.I'm making music now because the time feels right. I hope you enjoy it!
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