1.Growing Up
My earliest musical memory is of hearing ‘The Sound Of Silence’ by Simon and Garfunkel when I was four years old. Brazil ’66 was on high rotation in our house as well. My dad was a cameraman and TV director who worked with many great musicians. He loved music more than anything – he had hundreds of classical and jazz records. My mother was part of a singing trio called The Starr Sisters in Los Angeles. She and her two sisters performed from the time they were little kids and travelled the world playing in clubs. They even supported Sammy Davis Jr. She stopped when she had me.
2.Inspirations
My all-time favourites feel like aunts and uncles to me… Neil Young, Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach, The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Joanna Newsom, Will Oldham, Elliott Smith, Frank Black, jazz legends like Chet Baker and Stan Getz, classical greats such as Franz Schubert and Vaughan Williams, show tune writers like Stephen Sondheim, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein. Of course there are too many others to mention. I love them because they move me. They all create such wonderful melodies and the lyricists among them help me to dream and know myself better. They have all opened my mind and heart.
3.Your Band
The Glamma Rays are Malika Elizabeth, Tiffany Sinton, Genevieve Davis and myself. We met while all our children were in primary school on the South Coast of Sydney. Mal, Tiff and Gen stood out to me as being very loving, unique, fun, slightly hippyish, talented individuals.
4.The Music You Make
We write songs and create harmonies that sound like they could be from the 1920s through to the 1960s. Influences are The Andrews Sisters, The Chordettes, Les Paul and Mary Ford, The Four Freshmen, The Beach Boys, The Mills Brothers, et cetera. We love to make people swoon and cry and laugh and be transported to a beautiful place. We feel it when we sing together and I know our audiences feel it too.
5.Music, Right Here, Right Now
There is a problem with many people not paying for music anymore. Spotify and Pandora are a complete disaster for independent artists. Talk about starvation wages! It seems like the groups who can tour a lot give their music away for free to attract folks to their shows, which makes it hard for the groups like us who have kids and are more recording artists. I’m not sure how independent recording artists are supposed to make a living out of their music except by having their songs used in film and TV or composing for the screen… which is now what I do.
[The Glamma Rays photo by Chris Frape]
The Glamma Rays performatThe Gasoline Pony,Friday August 12,along withTrish Young.
