Well, hello there! I’m sorry it’s been so long, but I’ve finally settled in Paris after a whirlwind few months. After an amazing afternoon performing at the XPoNential Music festival, I had exactly one day to pack like a wild-thing and hop on a plane for France. Since Paris clears out for vacations during August, I spent the month traveling around through Brittany and Normandy, stopping by Lorient for the Festival Interceltique held there annually.
If you’ve been following
my tweets, you might already have heard some of my stories from abroad, but if you’re not on the twitter bandwagon, let me bring you up to speed. I’m currently on the first leg of a year-long adventure funded by the
Thomas J. Watson Foundation. My harp and I will be traveling through France, Germany, India, Indonesia, China and Japan over the next 11 months, researching how new recording, distribution, and social media technologies are changing the lives of independent musicians abroad.
Venus Zine in California ran a really nice feature on my trip that you can check out online here.
Web-designer extraordinaire
Vance Bell and I worked hard this summer to finish unveiling the new face of
www.gilliangrassie.com , transforming the site into an interactive, multimedia travel blog so
that we can stay in touch during this year of globe-trotting discovery. Recent posts include
highlights from the XPN Festival,
my top 10 Desert Island songs for the new WXPN 885 countdown, (if you've submitted your own list, please post it as a comment on my blog - I'd love to see what you chose!), and my first post about
my life in Paris. There's also a photo album from Normandy up on my
flickr account, which is linked on gilliangrassie.com’s front page (proper blog about THAT trip forthcoming).
I’m really excited about all this coming year holds in store for me and really do hope you’ll stay in touch – the new site makes commenting on the blog posts super easy! I’d love to hear from you.
All my best… from Paris!
-Gillian
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