[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: Anna Hutchison courtesy Dana Idlet”][/title]
The story of singer-songwriter Dana Idlet starts in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, a picturesque town of 4,800 that was incorporated in 1888. A recent post on the town’s Facebook page lamented the cancelation of the Junior Civic League’s Beans and Cornbread Dinner due to a deluge of rain that was forcing most everybody inside. The latest announcement on the town’s website congratulated the school’s high school football team for beating Star City, a victory that moved them into the 4A State Semi-finals.
It was here, in this tight-knit community, where Dana went to school. The Idlets lived twenty minutes south of town, moving there after they left Houston. When she mentions that her childhood home-place included one hundred acres, it’s as if a bell goes off. Instantly, the recollection of Winnie-the-Pooh’s hundred-acre wood emerges, with all its nostalgia and honey and timeless wisdom.
Not a bad comparison. Her own growing up was a bit magical. She and her younger brother, Steven, had the run of the place. What she remembers from that time is that they seldom watched TV. They played outdoors, discovering the natural world as easily as their city counterparts were fine-tuning their video-gaming skills. When school was in session, the bus picked them up, the ride long as they bumped along the country roads that passed farmhouses and open fields and cows and horses and riots of wildflowers.
The constant in the Idlet household was music. Their father, Ezra, along with Keith Grimwood, play together in Trout Fishing in America, the widely popular eclectic folk/rock band best known for its family and children’s songs (and their four Grammy® nominations). They’ve been together for more than thirty years. If you’ve grown up in Arkansas, the songs of your childhood likely include ones from this iconic duo.
Holidays, especially, were filled with music. After Thanksgiving, they’d invite all their musician friends for a big “hootenanny,” a tradition that continues today. And Dana did take piano for eight years. “I never really got the hang of it,” she says. “My piano teacher would play a song to me and I’d memorize it. I’d kind of fake it instead of spending that time practicing during the week. I just played by ear.”
It’s easy to think that singing and songwriting and playing instruments felt as natural to her as walking and talking to the rest of us. But that was not the case. “Singing in front of people was always terrifying. I’d sing in the car or shower, but even my parents didn’t hear that.”
Growing up, Dana had other interests. She played basketball, attending Tulsa University on scholarship. At 6’2″ and with a good deal of talent, she was an excellent center. During that time, she signed up for an art class. “I considered it a blow-off hour,” she says. But the class struck a chord. Dana loved art, and she was good at it.
When school ended, she painted, showing her work at local venues like the Fayetteville Underground. (Her brother Steven attended TU as well, and went on to play basketball for overseas teams in Switzerland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Canada.)
In 2011, during an art residency to the Azores, a group of nine islands 800 miles off the coast of Portugal, Dana’s life turned again. She stayed seven months, in a village of 200 people, with only a few cars around. She swam each day in the dazzling ocean, ate fresh fish, and vegetables newly plucked from the garden. Dana’s only goal was to come back with new work for a future art show. But then she discovered a CD by folk/blues singer Alela Diane, and fell in love. “There was no piano around but my friend let me borrow a guitar and I sat with Alela Diane’s music and learned it string by string. After I felt like I knew it well enough, I shared it with two friends I’d made there. They loved it and kept asking me to play and sing. It was terrifying, but I did it, and by the time I left I had about four hours of music I’d learned.
“I became part of this community. I played guitar while they were cooking dinner. A shop owner from the village ended up giving me her guitar from twenty years ago. It stayed strapped to me and I became totally obsessed. It was the perfect spot and the perfect time. No one knew me there. No one knew my dad was this really great musician. I think sometimes you have to get away to be able to find things out about yourself.”
One of the things she discovered was that she was still afraid to perform on stage in front of people she did not know. But this time that didn’t stop her. Once she came back to Northwest Arkansas, she booked three shows in a row. “I thought if I could make it through that weekend, then I could make it work. That first show, I think I cried all the way through because I was so scared.”
At her second show, a friend and fellow musician, Jackson Jennings, stepped in to help. The two hit it off so well they started performing as Air Loom, a collaboration that lasted more than a year.
When she started a solo album, she recorded it at her childhood home, and that’s when things really got going. “My dad asked Keith Grimwood [Trout Fishing in America] to play bass. I needed percussion and guitar, so my dad did that.” Before the brainstorming ended, Adam Collins, who plays banjo and vibraphone, signed on and the group became known as Dana Louise and the Glorious Birds. Their sound is described as “roots-rooted flung-into-the-future folk.” But I can tell you this: Dana’s voice is smooth, her lyrics catchy and heartfelt, and at times she’ll remind you of indie singers like Ingrid Michaelson. When asked to describe her sound, she comes up with only one word: “real.”
What amazes Dana is how this album, released in May 2015, came together. “The band kind of formed naturally through all this recording. My dad is thrilled, but he knows he can’t pounce on me with excitement. I think we’ve finally figured out my limit. If I’m curious about some aspect of music, he wants to give me all the information he has. He wants to download his brain into my brain.” Dana laughs as she says this, and in this one statement is the all the joy her dad must feel to have his daughter follow in his musical footsteps.
“My dad is awesome. My mom would do anything for me,” Dana says. “My aunts and uncle and brother and cousin. My friends. This band. The support I have in my life is overwhelming.”
Now, when she talks about performing, fear doesn’t come into play. “There’s this back and forth that happens when the audience loves something you’re singing and playing, and it elevates the energy in the room. I think everyone can feel that. You can feel people being touched by your music. And that’s whether it’s a song I’ve written or a song a friend has written; I get so much from that. It’s kind of the same feeling I got when I played basketball and I was on the court and our team made a handful of good plays together and the crowd was cheering. Your whole body is covered in goose-bumps and you feel like you could jump all the way out of the gym. Music can be like that.”
Looking at it now, she can see her creative progression that backtracks all the way to Prairie Grove. It was there that she discovered her athletic ability. Playing basketball led her to art, that led her to the Azores, that led her to music, that brought her right back home. She sees it as a perfect circle, as round as any basketball, and as beautiful as her time on stage, the music doing its magic, and everyone—the band and the audience—becoming part of something new and bright and wonderful.
To find out more about Dana, visit danalouisemusic.com.
Her album, Dana Louise and the Glorious Birds, is available
there and at other locations, including Amazon.com.
