Holly Figueroa O'Reilly, 2010
(This is in first person, because I wrote it. If you need something a little more music businesslike, scroll down a little bit to the bio that Mr. Bob Doerschuk so kindly put together for us in 2007, or down to the press release bio.)
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In May of 2009, while performing at the Northwest Folklife Festival, I lost my singing voice. I had been losing some of my vocal range for a couple of months, and my hands had been giving me trouble, which I attributed to the aging process.
When I completely lost my voice on stage, I got myself to a specialist.
After seeing a rheumatologist, I was diagnosed with RA (Rheumatoid Arthritis) and AS (Ankylosing Spondylitis), both inflammatory diseases that affect the body's joints.
(Here's a little further explanation, for geeks like me: There is a joint in our throats (called the cricoarytenoid joint) between the cricoid and arytenoid cartilages in the back wall of the larynx that are rotated by the vibration of vocal cords, and change the tone of voice. In my case, this joint swelled and was causing my voice to change within moments of speaking, let alone singing. Singing was out of the question, and both my RA and AS were out of control.)
After trying every type of medication on the market for both diseases with no success, I had given up on singing. I spent a year in silence. I stopped listening to music, stopped thinking about it, and didn't pick my guitar up for fear that I would miss it too much.
It wasn't until this past spring, when I started taking massive amounts of corticosteroids for an asthma exacerbation, that I noticed my joints seemed to be recovering. I slowly weaned myself down to a dosage of prednisone that wouldn't make me sick, but would allow me to sing. And I sang and sang and sang...for a while.
It turns out that the prednisone, taken long term in the dosage that I was taking, is making me just as sick as the disease it was helping, and it isn't something that I can continue on at the dosage that keeps me singing.
So, I am prepared to go off of prednisone completely and to lose my singing voice again. But I wanted to make some records before I did that. I made a live record in May 2010, am finishing up a covers record, and will start an originals record in the fall. And then, I'm probably done, unless my voice comes back spontaneously. (I waited for that for a long time. Not counting on it.)
I set up a way to pre order on Paypal, and by check and money order, and then used Kickstarter as a way to finish the preorders. In total, over 150 people preordered, and we have the money we need to finish these records.
When I am not in the studio, (and not taking care of my two children and two stepchildren), I am collecting and archiving every live performance, demo, video, etc, that was ever recorded from 1995 to 2010. This is a labor of love, and involves hundreds of mp3s and pictures and videos and travelogues. I am getting video, pictures, bootlegged shows, etc from all over the country, and putting them all in one central location.
Holly-Press Release Bio
If you have listened to the radio lately (NPR’s All Things Considered, All Songs Considered, and hundreds of radio stations all over the country), or watched television, (FX’s show “Damages” chose Holly’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Everybody Knows”, for the last scene of their season finale in April, 2010), you have probably heard Holly Figueroa O’Reilly…you just might not have known that she lived in your back yard.
“I have lived on Bainbridge Island off and on for a little over ten years,” says the unassuming, twice Grammy nominated mom of two. “My kids go to school on Bainbridge, and I volunteer on the island part time, so I’m here quite a bit.”
Holly has released five records in the last ten years, (only 3 still in print), has performed over 900 dates in 48 states, criss-crossing the country from Seattle to Maine to Texas and back, usually home schooling her children on the road in the process, regaling audiences with tales of her travels, and songs ranging from sweet to sultry and everything in between.
“Very few shows have gone by without at least one person approaching me after a show, with a CD they bought years ago in hand, asking me to sign it…and as I am signing, they will tell me about how my music has touched them, or changed their lives. How one of my songs gave them the courage they needed to leave an abusive spouse. How one of my songs let them know that it really was okay to come out to their parents and their friends. That’s why I do this.”
After taking a year off of singing due to illness (she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in May, 2009, after losing her voice during a performance at the Northwest Folklife Festival.) to swelling in the joint in her throat, her voice was reduced to a whisper, and her hands would no longer play the guitar. She had to learn how to sing and play all over again.
Since regaining her voice, she has been working on three new records: a cover album, a record of original music, and a live record, with the goal to finish them all before the end of 2010.
She is also in school full time to finish her dual degree in K12 and Special Education, and writing a book on the history of women in the music industry. “I like to stay busy”, she says. “I never really know when my voice is going to go again, so I want to record and perform as much as possible until then, but I also found that I had a passion to educate, especially gifted children, when I realized that the public school system had no means of educating my own two extremely gifted kids. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know where to turn. Someday, I want to be that place to turn for moms like me who don’t know where to go.”
Links:
NPR’s “All Things Considered”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1127434
NPR’s “All Songs Considered”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8959839
FX, TV show, “Damages”, as covered by “No Depression Magazine Online”
http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/acoustic-americana-music-guide-98?xg_source=activity
Holly Figueroa O'Reilly (2007, Bob Doerschuk)
(Special thanks to Bob Doerschuk) Here’s what we learn from Holly O’Reilly’s unforgettable new release, Gifts & Burdens. • There is magic in music – magic enough to sometimes see the future unfold in song. • You can make your debut, starting fresh, more than once. • Life can be generous, even in its cruelty.
Begin with the music. The melodies and words are magical enough. They speak with a folk-inflected eloquence darkened only slightly by modern ironies. “Your sickness is my weakness, ‘til you’re ready to say goodbye,” she proclaims on “Lay Them Down,” while on “One More Time” she ties passages of day and night, rain and sun, into seasons of the heart, always with a lilt that lifts each tune toward the light of gentle surprise.
It’s music like that that inspired critics to call O’Reilly “one of the best new songwriters around,” (Tret Fure) “a force to be reckoned with,” (Rockrgrl Magazine) “incredibly exciting,” (The Recording Academy) “criminally ignored and unjustly under-appreciated …” (Apple ITunes) If all this sounds familiar, it may be because you’ve heard these same raves applied to Holly Figueroa. In fact, O’Reilly’s voice – alternately smoky, fragile, teasing, and earthy – recalls that of Figueroa, to an uncanny degree. There’s good reason for this: Figueroa and O’Reilly are the same person – yet also different in more than just their names. In this respect, Gifts & Burdens is both a farewell and an introduction. Much has changed in O’Reilly’s life over the past few years. And strange as it seems, she was forecasting these changes in these songs, without even knowing it at the time.
Flash back to 1996. Holly Figueroa has left her youth in Ohio behind and put a life together in Washington State that combined the pleasures of family with her love for playing music. Traveling often with her daughter and younger son, she grew a following one venue at a time. From the Bitter End in New York to the Sweetwater Saloon in San Francisco, she shared stages with Dan Fogelberg, Barbara Kessler, Rose Polenzani, and Caroline Aiken, or headed the bill herself. Word spread faster when NPR's "All Things Considered" discovered her and twice gave her national exposure. Her albums – Three Chord Plea, Dream in Red, How It Is, Live in New York City – inspired comparisons to artists whose only similarities are excellence and individuality: Lucinda Williams, Ani DiFranco, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris … This was her position last year as she entered the studio in Tacoma with a group of friends, including producer Evan Brubaker, and began cutting the tracks that would become Gifts & Burdens. She brought the best of her recent material with her and nestled it into intimate acoustic settings. The results were beautiful, sometimes almost painfully so -- yet even though she was performing her own songs, she had no idea that they were speaking to her about changes yet to come.
“All my songs on Gifts & Burdens were written between 2003 and ’06,” she says. “Looking back on it, I can only say, ‘Wow, how could I not know I was in trouble?’ I had no idea that in writing these songs, I was writing about my own life.” That revelation hit in September 2006, one month after finishing the final tracks, as her husband announced that he wanted a break from their relationship. It wasn’t a divorce, nor was it exactly a conventional separation; they remain close to one another and partners in raising their children. Whatever it was, though, it changed everything overnight.
“I listen now to ‘One More Time’ and it’s like … duh,” she says, laughing. “I know that duh isn’t the most literary way to put it, but it says a lot. Or I listen to ‘What You Wanted,’ which I thought I was writing about some friends of mine who were separating. Eventually I realized that I was writing about how my husband felt about me and how I felt about him a lot of the time.”
With this perspective, these songs began to feel more like messages, though at first O’Reilly was in no mood to listen. The project gathered dust as she reassembled the pieces of her life. Each day felt like a step forward, from trimming down to the point that this summer she will run her first triathlon. At the same time she pulled back from music, focusing her energy where it was most needed. A feeling arose that her days as a musician were past. “I couldn’t even look at my guitar,” she says. “I just wanted to concentrate on my kids and my health. I had toured so much, especially with my daughter since she was little, and I wanted to make that up to them. But then Evan kept after me. He said, ‘You know, you need to get this record out.’ And preorders kept coming in, around 600 after a while, some of them for as much as $300. So I had to do this. It was really difficult, but we took care of the mastering, figured out the artwork … and we did finish it.”
She finished something else too, as she traded her married name for one that honors her lineage back to her Irish forebears. And with her family’s encouragement, she has transformed the difficulties of 2006 into a process of rebirth and reclaimed the place she had once nearly left behind. “I realized that when I stop performing, it’s like I’ve stopped breathing,” she explains. “It’s like, I have to eat. I have to breathe. I have to perform. But if I had to choose between performing and writing songs, I would definitely pick writing. Of course, I’m fortunate in that this is a choice I don’t have to make.”
The Seattle Weekly says of “Gifts and Burdens”, “the tunes often have a wistful, lonely, late-night quality about them but, at the same time, are not really a downer,” O’Reilly is singled out as “sounding both compellingly contemporary and ancient simultaneously” by the Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange. Gifts & Burdens has already inspired a flurry of praise, though none closer to the mark than Seattle Sound’s review: “a gentle, moving example of well played Americana.” For everyone who has weathered a storm and found the promise of peace in the light that follows, Gifts & Burdens bears special meaning. This music is about us as much as it is about the extraordinary Holly O’Reilly – and that, too, is magic.