Lever to Heaven

Gillian Grassie wants you to hear her harp beat.

by M.J. Fine

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Published: Oct 24, 2007

Ray Brown PLUCK: With her first album, Serpentine, Grassie aims to counter the preconception that the harp is a sleep aid. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

How would a kid from Germantown get her heart set on playing the harp? Gillian Grassie doesn't remember when she first saw the instrument, but by 4 she'd persuaded her parents to get it for her.

"The store had one of those terrible plywood lap-harps with like 12 strings on it, and my arms were too short for me to reach the bottom string," she says over e-mail, "so the owner sweetly suggested that I wait a few years before taking lessons."

Before her arms grew, Grassie's family moved to a farm in Chester County; when she was 12, a harp and flute concert at the local Quaker meeting rekindled her interest. She soon started taking private lessons, and two years later she performed at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival.

"One of the main advantages of playing an uncommon instrument is that you get to meet your heroes," she says. Three years of attending the festival exposed her to a variety of traditions and techniques. "My uncle gave me a compilation CD from the PBS Celtic Harpistry when I first started playing, and by the time I was 18, I'd met, studied or performed with almost all the artists on the disc."

A semester in Switzerland at 15 freed her from a busy social schedule, giving her more time to explore the lever harp. While trying to cover John Mayer's "Sucker," she hit upon the idea of making it sound as percussive as a guitar. That same fall, after discovering Philip Larkin's work in class and beginning to write poems of her own, Grassie wrote her first song, and an EP followed in 2005, before she started college.

Now 21, she's celebrating the release of her first full-length. For pop fans with a craving for something a little different, Serpentine is a treat. Grassie gives as much respect to singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Ani DiFranco as she does to such harpists as Catriona McKay and Rüdiger Oppermann, and she wants to counter the preconception that her instrument's for putting people to sleep.

Live, Grassie recently started playing with Chris Coyle on upright bass and Mark Dryberg on drums, and she plans to eventually add a guitarist and someone on the Rhodes organ. But for Serpentine, she returned to MilkBoy to work again with Townhall's Tim Sonnefeld, who contributes drums, guitars, banjo, bass and keys. Her wordy, imaginative tunes are all about growing up, whether confronting destructive behavior (the trip-hop-tinged "Tell Me") or accepting a lover's silence ("No Answer").

Subtly evoking the government's shameful responses to Iraq and Katrina, the folky "Sweet Metallic" casts America as a teenager who makes you proud and exasperates you at the same time. "I tried to write something musically that didn't sound like a political song, that sounded pretty upbeat, friendly, innocuous, something you could listen to a few times and not notice was talking about men in their coffins," she says.

She doesn't have as much time for writing and playing now that she's majoring in comparative literature, but she's betting her studies will pay off in the long run. "I want a lot to pull from when I write songs and I want my perspective to be broad and mature, something that Bryn Mawr is pushing me toward," she says. Choosing a school without a music program was intentional. "I want to be a whole person, and it's not that you can't be an intellectual without a degree or that you can't be whole without being academic; it's just that academics works for me, they're stimulating. ... I think in the end my songs will be richer for my education."

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Fri., Oct. 26, 7:30 p.m., $15, with Max Gabriel and Des Mers, MilkBoy Coffee, 2 E. Lancaster Ave., Ardmore, 610-645-5269, www.milkboycoffee.com.

 

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