Ariana Gillis Come on… Feel the Joy By Richard Cuccaro There are performers who scale the heights of imagination and feeling, who walk the high wire of entertainment with such aplomb it leaves audience members giddy. It happened at the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA) Conference last year when we first saw Ariana Gillis, and it happens over and over, every time we see her. We find ourselves wondering, “Just how good can she get?” Her powerful voice, soaring through the high registers, suggests the pinnacle is not yet in sight. Likewise, her song-stories, fed by a keen mind open to both reality and parables of fantasy, spark a wonder in us. Rock critic Dave Marsh has said, “Ariana Gillis is the best new artist I’ve heard in a very long time…” Elton John collaborator Bernie Taupin has added, “I’m staggered by how good she is…” When Ariana sings “Oh The World,” about an act of love so precious, it seems too good to be true. But it is … all of it. When she was a young girl, her mother gave her the kind of attention I’ve rarely heard of: Every night my mom would lay down with me / Tell me things I could do, things I could be / Oh, the world, the world / Oh, the world, she yawned and said to me / Hate to wake you / But the night is young, you’re so young / Don’t give up on her so soon ‘cuz she’s not finished yet… A kite in the wind held back by a string/ If you cut that rope you could be anything… In one of her many YouTube videos, we watch as she and her father, David, play “Oh The World” as a duet. David on mandolin matches Ariana’s voice note for note. It’s sheer bliss. Beginnings Canadian singer-songwriter Ariana Gillis was born Nov. 6, 1990, in Hamilton, Ontario. Her family lived in St. Catherine until Ariana was a year old, then moved further west to Vineland — about an hour south of Toronto. This is where she lives today with her family. Ariana has two younger sisters. They both play music but don’t aspire to play professionally. They’ve seen what a musical career path looks like in Ariana’s rigorous schedule. In terms of parental guidance, Ariana has been lucky. As stated earlier, her mother has given her stellar emotional support. She wasn’t alone. Ariana’s father, David, always played music. He’d wanted to play piano and bought a keyboard, Ariana told me. He would constantly stop to play his guitar sitting nearby and finally gave up the piano and just stuck with the guitar. David created his own arrangements of songs and eventually competed in the annual United States championship contest in Winfield, Kan. She and her sisters would ask him to play a song each night before they’d go to sleep. He had a small career going when he was younger but gave it up and decided to help Ariana when he saw how talented she was. Ariana took singing lessons from the time she was 6 until she was around 12 or 13. At that point, the conservatory “cookie cutter” program became a liability. Her father encouraged her to find her own voice. Conservatories, as Ariana put it, “make everybody sound identical.” The depth of her musical skills are formidable. Ariana took piano lessons when she was young and didn’t become interested in guitar until she got one when she was 12. She’ll include accordion in her act at times. She also took music lessons in high school, studying oboe and upright bass and drums — and still wants to learn trumpet. Her Influences Ariana listened to things her father did. Bob Dylan, The Beatles … and Patty Griffin. She told me that Griffin is still her favorite artist.” She’s one of my biggest inspirations,” Ariana told me.. She also became interested in Canadian artists like Sarah Slean and the band Metric. Ariana went to a Catholic high school. Once a week, there would be a assembly/prayer service that would end with a student performance. More often than not, it would be Ariana and a girlfriend who’d do a cover song, something that the student body could relate to and that reflected the sermon that day. Love was often the “go-to” theme. Most of those early covers were taken from Griffin, Slean and Metric. Later on she would discover Tom Waits, Josh Ritter and Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes). When I mentioned that I found her to be a lot like Josh Ritter in her imaginative storytelling, she verified that observation, saying “I like it that he [Josh] tries to intertwine another story with a love song… it makes it more interesting. That’s what I aspire to do.” Early Songwriting Efforts Ariana began writing early on, especially after getting her own guitar. She recalled, “They weren’t very good.” I interjected: “You have to start somewhere,” and she agreed — that was the point. David was always supportive, but didn’t coddle her in his criticism. She said, “He’d tell me if one of my songs sucked. It hurt for a while, but I knew he wasn’t doing it to be mean. He wanted me to get better.” She said that she’d often co-opt Patty Griffin material and turn it into something of her own. That’s an excellent way of turning “inspiration” into “foundation.” The Star Begins to Rise The high school prayer assemblies weren’t Ariana’s first foray into performing. When Ariana was around 13, her father would take her with him when he was playing certain gigs, especially ones that he’d booked himself. She would open for him and sing one or two songs. David would also perform at an annual Christmas show and would have Ariana perform as well. When Ariana was 15 or16, she attended an Ontario Council of Folk Festivals (OCFF) Conference. It was the first year of a youth program established for young performers.. Ariana was chosen to perform in a youth showcase. She received a lot of attention and at 17 was hired to perform at a folk festival. Her bio states that she was “chosen as Young Performer of the Year at the 2009 Canadian Folk Music Awards.” When she was 16, she released a self-titled demo which had only 300 copies printed — primarily used for her appearance at her first conference. It was more “folky” and employed fingerstyle guitar. At her father’s urging, Ariana attended more folk conferences which continued to raise her profile. David started calling around asking bookers for venues to let Ariana open for artists they’d already booked. The Crisis On Ariana’s myspace page I read about a wider range of traumatic life experiences than we’d discussed in our interview: “Ariana writes deep songs probably due to the several life-threatening situations she has encountered — like weeks of intensive care at birth; or a near drowning from being caught in a riptide; or double pneumonia where Ariana lay bedridden for months, gasping and fighting for her every breath. These soul-defining experiences are the catalyst that affects the skewed stories she is compelled to tell. Perhaps this is where Ariana realized there’s so much to live for and so much to make everything count.” Ariana didn’t really become serious about music until a three-month bout with double pneumonia brought her close to death. She became ill during her last semester in high school. During that time she thought she’d overcome it, but had to retreat to bed as it hadn’t really gone away. She slept in an upright position to keep breathing, waking up every hour, each night, coughing from the fluid in her lungs. When breathing itself is in jeopardy, it’s not a far reach to feel death’s presence. Ariana came out of it with a will to fight. That involved expressing herself musically. Even though her illness left her debilitated, she still managed to graduate from high school and made the honor roll. After high school, still recovering, Ariana decided to forego any plans for college. She did audition for a school in Toronto for jazz guitar. She played recordings of her original work for the interviewer and, highly impressed, he advised her not to attend school, but to stick with her own work. “So…” she said, laughing, “I didn’t go back!” With scarring in both lungs, it took a long time for her to get her lung capacity back. It took six months before she was able to play again. Sometime soon after that six-month period, Ariana was in the studio doing the vocals for her first full CD. “It was really tough doing the vocals — I was so weak,” she said. There were two separate breakthrough moments in her path to full recovery. Sometime after the first album was released, during a practice session, she felt a crack in her voice and she felt something “open up.” She thought, “I have my voice back.” Then, a couple of years later, she felt the same thing happen again, and realized that she had made it all the way back. Her voice then assumed the full command that she has today. The Career in Earnest Ariana’s first album, To Make It Make Sense, was released in 2009, when she was 18 years old. She got a publicist who helped her introduce her CD, getting radio airplay even before it was officially released, and who helped her get bookings — and they were exclusively her gigs. “That’s when I started becoming really professional,” she told me. Her second CD, Forget Me Not, was launched in 2011 with a live appearance on the U.S. satellite station Sirius XM and the show was hosted by the aforementioned Dave Marsh. We learn from her bio that: “David Marsh played the track, ‘John and the Monster’ to his radio audience — one response was a phone call from an enthusiastic listener who wanted to know more about the unusual song, and the singer. The mystery caller was Elton John’s lyricist and songwriting partner Bernie Taupin.” That’s quite a connection — and one hell of a quote that came out of it. The Writing I asked Ariana about the source for the allegorical song, “John and the Monster.” She couldn’t pinpoint anything in particular. For Ariana, songs come at her out of nowhere from every direction. She said, “It’s like word vomit… all over the page. I wake up the next day and say, ‘Where did that come from? Everything influences me and I can’t choose what’s going to and what’s not going to.” We discussed the underlying truth of the fantastical story in the song — that something of beauty can be destroyed by a society who would imprison it and destroy its magic. In this case, it’s a creature that lives hiding in a lake and can cure disease. John, dying of a brain tumor rows out to the middle of the lake and coaxes the monster out of hiding. Then: The creature takes John into his arms and says, “don’t weep, I’ll keep you safe from harm.” John goes to sleep that night and from the monster’s touch, the cancer leaves his head. At the song’s end, the captured monster is dying, so John, sacrificing himself, sets him free, becomes sick again and perishes. It’s quite a feat of storytelling for someone so young. In a different vein, I watched a video of a newer song on YouTube, “From the Start.” A simple but eloquent ode to the naiveté of young romance, it’s a confessional about a lost love: All these reeds, twisted thoughts, they are whipped against the rocks / Crying out for a net, dip your fingers in regret / I could have warned you from the start / I should have let you swim away / I thought you were mine to keep / And it would always stay the same. She expounds on it thusly: “We want for them [relationships] to be forever. We have all these dreams… but it slowly starts to disintegrate in front of us and we wonder, what happened to my shiny dream?” It’s difficult to express here, its sound and the way it packs such an emotional wallop. In the video, her father, ever the supporter and mentor, sits across from her and when she finishes, he murmurs, “Not bad.” In response, Ariana laughs. When we first encountered Ariana at the 2011 NERFA last November, we were shocked to discover that the youthful-looking sideman on guitar, Dobro and mandolin was Ariana’s father, David. We’re used to it now, but it hasn’t lost that sense of a treasured combination of father-daughter bonding in such an exalted endeavor — the making of music. Ariana and David will be making a number of appearances in the United States this fall, and specifically the Living Room in NYC each month. Her live performances are a must-see. We hope you’ll join us for every show. Website: arianagillis.com Upcoming Appearances: Sep 1 12 noon Shelter Valley Folk Festival, Grafton, ON 6 Peaceful Acres Horse Benefit Event, Schenectady, NY More info TBA 20 7pm The Living Room, New York, NY 21 8pm Live Wire Music Series, Kingston, ON 28 8pm North End Studios, Burlington, VT 29 8pm The Towne Crier, Pawling, NY Nov 8 Musicon4, NYC (see listings for info)

Come on… Feel the Joy

By Richard Cuccaro

There are performers who scale the heights of imagination and feeling, who walk the high wire of entertainment with such aplomb it leaves audience members giddy. It happened at the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA) Conference last year when we first saw Ariana Gillis, and it happens over and over, every time we see her. We find ourselves wondering, “Just how good can she get?” Her powerful voice, soaring through the high registers, suggests the pinnacle is not yet in sight. Likewise, her song-stories, fed by a keen mind open to both reality and parables of fantasy, spark a wonder in us. Rock critic Dave Marsh has said, “Ariana Gillis is the best new artist I’ve heard in a very long time…” Elton John collaborator Bernie Taupin has added, “I’m staggered by how good she is…”

When Ariana sings “Oh The World,” about an act of love so precious, it seems too good to be true. But it is … all of it. When she was a young girl, her mother gave her the kind of attention I’ve rarely heard of: Every night my mom would lay down with me / Tell me things I could do, things I could be / Oh, the world, the world / Oh, the world, she yawned and said to me / Hate to wake you / But the night is young, you’re so young / Don’t give up on her so soon ‘cuz she’s not finished yet… A kite in the wind held back by a string/ If you cut that rope you could be anything…

In one of her many YouTube videos, we watch as she and her father, David, play “Oh The World” as a duet. David on mandolin matches Ariana’s voice note for note. It’s sheer bliss.

Beginnings

Canadian singer-songwriter Ariana Gillis was born Nov. 6, 1990, in Hamilton, Ontario. Her family lived in St. Catherine until Ariana was a year old, then moved further west to Vineland — about an hour south of Toronto. This is where she lives today with her family.

Ariana has two younger sisters. They both play music but don’t aspire to play professionally. They’ve seen what a musical career path looks like in Ariana’s rigorous schedule.

In terms of parental guidance, Ariana has been lucky. As stated earlier, her mother has given her stellar emotional support. She wasn’t alone. Ariana’s father, David, always played music. He’d wanted to play piano and bought a keyboard, Ariana told me. He would constantly stop to play his guitar sitting nearby and finally gave up the piano and just stuck with the guitar. David created his own arrangements of songs and eventually competed in the annual United States championship contest in Winfield, Kan. She and her sisters would ask him to play a song each night before they’d go to sleep. He had a small career going when he was younger but gave it up and decided to help Ariana when he saw how talented she was.

Ariana took singing lessons from the time she was 6 until she was around 12 or 13. At that point, the conservatory “cookie cutter” program became a liability. Her father encouraged her to find her own voice. Conservatories, as Ariana put it, “make everybody sound identical.”

The depth of her musical skills are formidable. Ariana took piano lessons when she was young and didn’t become interested in guitar until she got one when she was 12. She’ll include accordion in her act at times. She also took music lessons in high school, studying oboe and upright bass and drums — and still wants to learn trumpet.

Her Influences

Ariana listened to things her father did. Bob Dylan, The Beatles … and Patty Griffin. She told me that Griffin is still her favorite artist.” She’s one of my biggest inspirations,” Ariana told me..

She also became interested in Canadian artists like Sarah Slean and the band Metric. Ariana went to a Catholic high school. Once a week, there would be a assembly/prayer service that would end with a student performance. More often than not, it would be Ariana and a girlfriend who’d do a cover song, something that the student body could relate to and that reflected the sermon that day. Love was often the “go-to” theme. Most of those early covers were taken from Griffin, Slean and Metric.

Later on she would discover Tom Waits, Josh Ritter and Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes). When I mentioned that I found her to be a lot like Josh Ritter in her imaginative storytelling, she verified that observation, saying “I like it that he [Josh] tries to intertwine another story with a love song… it makes it more interesting. That’s what I aspire to do.”

Early Songwriting Efforts

Ariana began writing early on, especially after getting her own guitar. She recalled, “They weren’t very good.” I interjected: “You have to start somewhere,” and she agreed — that was the point. David was always supportive, but didn’t coddle her in his criticism. She said, “He’d tell me if one of my songs sucked. It hurt for a while, but I knew he wasn’t doing it to be mean. He wanted me to get better.” She said that she’d often co-opt Patty Griffin material and turn it into something of her own. That’s an excellent way of turning “inspiration” into “foundation.”

The Star Begins to Rise

The high school prayer assemblies weren’t Ariana’s first foray into performing. When Ariana was around 13, her father would take her with him when he was playing certain gigs, especially ones that he’d booked himself. She would open for him and sing one or two songs. David would also perform at an annual Christmas show and would have Ariana perform as well.

When Ariana was 15 or16, she attended an Ontario Council of Folk Festivals (OCFF) Conference. It was the first year of a youth program established for young performers.. Ariana was chosen to perform in a youth showcase. She received a lot of attention and at 17 was hired to perform at a folk festival. Her bio states that she was “chosen as Young Performer of the Year at the 2009 Canadian Folk Music Awards.”

When she was 16, she released a self-titled demo which had only 300 copies printed — primarily used for her appearance at her first conference. It was more “folky” and employed fingerstyle guitar.

At her father’s urging, Ariana attended more folk conferences which continued to raise her profile. David started calling around asking bookers for venues to let Ariana open for artists they’d already booked.

The Crisis

On Ariana’s myspace page I read about a wider range of traumatic life experiences than we’d discussed in our interview: “Ariana writes deep songs probably due to the several life-threatening situations she has encountered — like weeks of intensive care at birth; or a near drowning from being caught in a riptide; or double pneumonia where Ariana lay bedridden for months, gasping and fighting for her every breath. These soul-defining experiences are the catalyst that affects the skewed stories she is compelled to tell. Perhaps this is where Ariana realized there’s so much to live for and so much to make everything count.”

Ariana didn’t really become serious about music until a three-month bout with double pneumonia brought her close to death. She became ill during her last semester in high school. During that time she thought she’d overcome it, but had to retreat to bed as it hadn’t really gone away. She slept in an upright position to keep breathing, waking up every hour, each night, coughing from the fluid in her lungs. When breathing itself is in jeopardy, it’s not a far reach to feel death’s presence. Ariana came out of it with a will to fight. That involved expressing herself musically. Even though her illness left her debilitated, she still managed to graduate from high school and made the honor roll.

After high school, still recovering, Ariana decided to forego any plans for college. She did audition for a school in Toronto for jazz guitar. She played recordings of her original work for the interviewer and, highly impressed, he advised her not to attend school, but to stick with her own work. “So…” she said, laughing, “I didn’t go back!”

With scarring in both lungs, it took a long time for her to get her lung capacity back. It took six months before she was able to play again. Sometime soon after that six-month period, Ariana was in the studio doing the vocals for her first full CD. “It was really tough doing the vocals — I was so weak,” she said.

There were two separate breakthrough moments in her path to full recovery. Sometime after the first album was released, during a practice session, she felt a crack in her voice and she felt something “open up.” She thought, “I have my voice back.” Then, a couple of years later, she felt the same thing happen again, and realized that she had made it all the way back. Her voice then assumed the full command that she has today.

The Career in Earnest

Ariana’s first album, To Make It Make Sense, was released in 2009, when she was 18 years old. She got a publicist who helped her introduce her CD, getting radio airplay even before it was officially released, and who helped her get bookings — and they were exclusively her gigs. “That’s when I started becoming really professional,” she told me.

Her second CD, Forget Me Not, was launched in 2011 with a live appearance on the U.S. satellite station Sirius XM and the show was hosted by the aforementioned Dave Marsh. We learn from her bio that: “David Marsh played the track, ‘John and the Monster’ to his radio audience — one response was a phone call from an enthusiastic listener who wanted to know more about the unusual song, and the singer. The mystery caller was Elton John’s lyricist and songwriting partner Bernie Taupin.” That’s quite a connection — and one hell of a quote that came out of it.

The Writing

I asked Ariana about the source for the allegorical song, “John and the Monster.” She couldn’t pinpoint anything in particular. For Ariana, songs come at her out of nowhere from every direction. She said, “It’s like word vomit… all over the page. I wake up the next day and say, ‘Where did that come from? Everything influences me and I can’t choose what’s going to and what’s not going to.”

We discussed the underlying truth of the fantastical story in the song — that something of beauty can be destroyed by a society who would imprison it and destroy its magic. In this case, it’s a creature that lives hiding in a lake and can cure disease. John, dying of a brain tumor rows out to the middle of the lake and coaxes the monster out of hiding. Then: The creature takes John into his arms and says, “don’t weep, I’ll keep you safe from harm.” John goes to sleep that night and from the monster’s touch, the cancer leaves his head. At the song’s end, the captured monster is dying, so John, sacrificing himself, sets him free, becomes sick again and perishes. It’s quite a feat of storytelling for someone so young.

In a different vein, I watched a video of a newer song on YouTube, “From the Start.” A simple but eloquent ode to the naiveté of young romance, it’s a confessional about a lost love: All these reeds, twisted thoughts, they are whipped against the rocks / Crying out for a net, dip your fingers in regret / I could have warned you from the start / I should have let you swim away / I thought you were mine to keep / And it would always stay the same. She expounds on it thusly: “We want for them [relationships] to be forever. We have all these dreams… but it slowly starts to disintegrate in front of us and we wonder, what happened to my shiny dream?” It’s difficult to express here, its sound and the way it packs such an emotional wallop.

In the video, her father, ever the supporter and mentor, sits across from her and when she finishes, he murmurs, “Not bad.” In response, Ariana laughs.

When we first encountered Ariana at the 2011 NERFA last November, we were shocked to discover that the youthful-looking sideman on guitar, Dobro and mandolin was Ariana’s father, David. We’re used to it now, but it hasn’t lost that sense of a treasured combination of father-daughter bonding in such an exalted endeavor — the making of music.

Ariana and David will be making a number of appearances in the United States this fall, and specifically the Living Room in NYC each month. Her live performances are a must-see. We hope you’ll join us for every show.

Website: arianagillis.com

Upcoming Appearances:

Sep 1 12 noon Shelter Valley Folk Festival, Grafton, ON

6 Peaceful Acres Horse Benefit Event, Schenectady, NY More info TBA

20 7pm The Living Room, New York, NY

21 8pm Live Wire Music Series, Kingston, ON

28 8pm North End Studios, Burlington, VT

29 8pm The Towne Crier, Pawling, NY

Nov 8 Musicon4, NYC (see listings for info)