Holly Figueroa O'Reilly, 2012 Bio
I'm an award winning, twice Grammy© nominated performing songwriter. I am also a pretty decent cook.
I have been touring and performing internationally since 1999, and have played over 900+ concerts in that time. In 12 years of writing, recording, and performing, I have have recorded 7 studio records, 2 live records, been included on 8 compilations, most notably Remembering Rachel: The Rachel Bissex Tribute Album (also including Dar Williams, Catie Curtis, Patty Larkin, Jennifer Kimball, The Kennedy's, Sloan Wainwright, and many others.). I also do studio/session work, and have performed on 11 other artist's records.
I started my career as a blues singer, and my first tour was with the inimitable Kathi McDonald. Kathi was an Ikette with Tina and Ike Turner at 19 years old, was a member of Leon Russell's Shelter People, released her debut record, "Insane Asylum" the year I was born (haha! Sorry, Kathi, I had to do it! ;-), and has appeared on 72 gold records in her 40 year career, including singing with The Rolling Stones, Joe Cocker, Betty Davis, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and dozens more…you can find her videos here on youtube, and visit her site athttp://kathimcdonald.com/
My first record, "Three Chord Plea" was a collection of original blues and blues inflected rock songs, but I moved into the Americana arena with my 2001 release, "Dream in Red"., produced by Evan Brubaker, and featuring Keith Lowe, Jonathan Kingaham, Kym Tuvim, Dan Tyack, and many more.
A few days before the record was released, NPR's "All Things Considered" did an interview with me about the song, which was based on the book "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. The interview is archived, and you can hear it athttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1127434 I released the record at the Bitter End in New York City on September 9, came home to Seattle and released it at the Tractor Tavern on September 10. The next day, the world changed.
The next studio release, I moved in another direction with the help of Jerry Marotta on drums and Tony Levin on bass. The record was "How it Is", and it got some airplay on major radio stations and was well received by press and fans. While I was touring behind the record, performing at the Bluebird in Nashville, a minor bidding war erupted to sign me between two major labels (that have since combined, imploded, reformed, and would have left me in the dust, no doubt). I declined every offer, and stayed with my indie label run by producer Evan Brubaker. (Cake Records).
I took some time off to have my second child, and released a Iive record (Live in New York City) in the interim. Then I was back in the studio, making "Gifts and Burdens", which I released the same year that I separated and eventually divorced my first husband. The record was the most well received of all of my records to that point, appearing on multiple radio top 40 charts, and nominated for a Grammy award for "Best Contemporary Folk Record", which Bob Dylan won that year. (I voted for him.)
I continued performing, but stopped touring between 2007 and 2009 to hammer out the details of my divorce and make sure my kids were taken care of well during the process. I was singing at the Northwest Folklife Festival in 2009 when I lost my voice. I sang half voice for the rest of the show, and found it very difficult to even walk back to my car. I was diagnosed with RA and AS (inflammatory arthritis disorders). I learned a lot about synovial fluid and joint destruction. There is a joint in our throats that allows our vocal cords to rotate called the cricoarytenoid joint. Mine was inflamed, and regardless of the treatment tried, the swelling would not reduce. My voice would not return for 2 years. My physicians and I finally came up with a regimen of chemotherapy that helps keep the swelling and joint destruction at a minimum, but I still have not gone into remission.
I no longer tour, but I still record and perform locally, and give voice and music lessons. I am also producing records in my home studio, and at a large Seattle facility, mainly for at risk youth, ranging from R&B to Hip Hop/Rap, to folk and blues.
Holly Figueroa O'Reilly (special thanks to 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.