An award-winning singer, songwriter, fingerstyle guitar player. In 2017 she earned International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship honors and since then has been on stages with the likes of Melissa Etheridge, Christopher Cross, and numerous other notable names in music. She has been featured in Guitar Player magazine, Acoustic Guitar magazine, and among Guitar World magazine’s “Best Acoustic Guitarists in the World Right Now” in 2021. She is also a two-time finalist in the USA Songwriting Competition and was featured in the GRAMMY Museum’s virtual program streaming from Los Angeles. Her official YouTube channel has an amazing 1.7 million combined video views. This interview was recorded on-location at the NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, where she was chosen to perform.
“He really got what I was saying, and I went back in the control room, and he started playing and it was, I just broke into tears, it was everything I wanted and so much more… It was so magical to know that when you work with the right people, if you tell them and describe to them the feeling that you want to convey, it's so much more beyond what you could have put on a piece of paper.”
“I think that capturing emotion in a piece sometimes is more important than doing anything flashy.”
“The hardest part, I think, for any musician is figuring out how to take what's in your mind and translate that into something that can be heard by other people in real time.”
“I think every person is more creative than they might give themselves credit for.”
“Some people have said that sometimes when they see a performance of mine, there's like there's angels on stage or something because they can't imagine that that much sound can come from one person.”
“I had a lot of fun working with the people on that album. Matthew Odmark from the band Jars of Clay… I just loved working with him… we ended up doing a whole album and bringing in Keith Carlock, who’s one of my favorite drummers. He's now playing with Steely Dan. I know he's played with Toto and Sting and John Mayer.”
“I (went to a) Dave Matthews concert… and I looked at him and he had this look of gratitude in his eyes, and I thought to myself, ‘I wonder what it would be like to write songs that would make such a difference in people's lives’.”
“Going into a new city where you don't know anybody it's sort of like starting from the beginning and starting fresh and you really have to build it. And each time I've gone to a city, in the beginning there might not been many people and then the next time there's a lot more and then there's more and you have to keep building it. But as an artist it's very cool to get to open for somebody like Tommy (Emmanuel) and then you show up and there's already thousands of people there. You didn't have to get any of them there.”
“It's about how to … find the music inside of the instrument and the melodies and how the guitar could sound like a horn and sing or how the guitar could have a bass line and a finger style pattern and a melody at the same time.”
“The music industry has changed (such) that live performance is a big part of it now, but some people are having entire careers on just digital media, and I find that to be very fascinating and I'm excited to embrace it a little bit more.”
“I feel like music is such a beautiful form of self-expression and I feel grateful to have somewhere to put all my thoughts and feelings.”
“When I first started writing songs I wanted to write self-help books through songs. That was my idea. I wanted to write songs that could help people and be hopeful.”
“Soaring Over Glacier Bay”
“Free World Citizen”