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Summer Russell: About Me

My life has been steeped in music for as long as I can remember.  I fell asleep as a baby listening to my parents sing and play guitar.  I remember making up nonsense songs as I sat on the tree swing outside our house. 

At 13 years old, I was in the school's all-girl choir.  One day early in the year, for the first time, we received music and sang in four-part harmony.  As I stood in the midst of all those voices, listening to this heavenly sound so unlike anything I'd ever known before, I was irrevocably lost.

I have been wandering ever since, following wherever I hear those voices in the distance, constantly trying to reproduce that sense of aching beauty that I felt at 13 years old. 

I found it again about five years later, when I discovered a cassette tape someone had left in a rental car.  It was Simon & Garfunkel's "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme."  From there I found a world I had only heard before, long ago, on my parents' vinyl records or strummed on their guitars--songwriters from decades ago who sang with an honesty and a way of weaving words that was unlike anything I'd been hearing on the radio.  I had been playing the guitar myself for a few years by then, and writing simple songs inspired by old Celtic folk music.  I spent hours late at night with my headphones on, filling my soul to the brim with these new-to-me songs, playing my guitar and writing in my notebooks and dreaming of being like Joni Mitchell when I grew up.

And that's pretty much still what I do.