I've been on the road, making my living as a full time touring indie folk singin songwriter for about three years, give or take (depending on how flexible you're willing to be in your definition of "a living," I guess). Before that I was a part-time touring folk singer and a part time recording studio engineer. Before that I was a full time recording studio engineer (also, at times, a part time cash register specialist at Whole Foods, a college student, a bank teller, the token female on the tech crew, a terrible waitress, Ruth in the Pirates of Penzance and a host of other things). As a rule I try not to put much stock in defining a person by their profession - a dangerous tendency that we have in this culture, I think - but since my brain, my heart, my music, my life, my ego, my livelihood and my identity are all kind of rolled up in one volatile little package that I load into a station wagon, drive all over the country and hoist on stage every night, it's sometimes hard to avoid. I'm working on it. With that in mind, though, I'll tell you that I was born in the tiny triangle of Virginia that DC gave back (aka Arlington) in the early 80s to two of the coolest people who ever lived. My intake of sugared cereal and commercial television were extremely limited, but my dad made me dolls and toy guitars out of wood on a workbench he had in the basement, so I guess it was a fair trade. I'm the oldest in a close knit pack of 4, which people who read about birth order always say "makes sense." People who know about astrology usually say that when they find out I'm a leo. Sometimes it drives me crazy. When I was 12 I started going to school early on Fridays to take the free guitar class being offered by Ms. Shull (we're still in touch and I think she's told me to call her Suzanne, but I can't do it). The first guitar that was "mine" (and I'm pretty sure it was gifted to me by my father so that I would stop touching his guitar, a '67 Martin in awesome condition that he wanted to keep that way) came a little later that year: a a cheap black Washburn Flying-V knock-off with yellowing humbuckers and a whammie bar. The first song I learned was "Joey," by Concrete Blonde. I got an acoustic guitar and started writing songs about vampires and drug dealers. Fast forward 4 years, I had grown a couple inches taller and incredibly antsy. I went to summer school after my sophomore year of high school and crowned myself a senior that fall. Everyone played along and I got to graduate a year early. A very bizarre series of events and conversations resulted in me moving to Boston a few days after my 17th birthday to enroll in college. I did four years at Berklee and graduated with a degree in music production and engineering. Three months later I turned 21, went sky diving and could finally get into all the cool places in Boston that had been off limits for so long. At this point I was pretty sure that I wanted to be an audio engineer forever, maybe move to LA and specialize in sound design for film. In the last few months of college I was having a heart to heart with Mark Wessel, my engineering mentor and favorite teacher ever. He's the kind of guy who comes off stern on the first day of class, but actually does that so he doesn't have to expend any energy on laying down the law for the rest of the semester. He's a goof ball and a sweetheart and was always encouraging me to use studio time at school to record my own songs (which I was still writing, although I was very focused on school and audio engineering and not performing much). As I was telling him about my plans, he shook his head slowly and said in a somber voice, "Well, you could do engineering, Becca, but I always envisioned you doing something so much more....creative." This sentence struck me like a bucket of ice water to the head; I gasped inwardly and saw in a moment that if my main engineering mentor was trying to nudge me away from engineering and towards music it probably meant a) he wanted something better/different for me than the career he had chosen, which is touching, or b) I'm a shitty engineer. Either way, it suddenly woke up the performer/writer/singer in me and all I wanted to do was grab my guitar and play. A stroke of what I recognize now to be incredibly good fortune resulted in my landing a job as an engineer/editor at a recording studio a few days after I graduated from school. I worked full-time at that studio (and at nights on my own songs) for months and months. My boss was incredibly supportive, allowing me to barter work hours for studio time to record my first album and, when the time came, was very understanding about me leaving for long weekends of shows, week long tours, three week tours, several month tours, and so on. After a year or so of alternating between working at the recording studio and working it on the road I decided that having an apartment was overrated, put everything in storage and became a well dressed homeless person (aka itinerant folk singer). I gypsied around the country for over a year, sleeping somewhere new almost every night, basically living on tips and CD sales and working on booking my life a few months out at whatever coffeeshop I could find with free internet and cheap coffee. Vagrancy was definitely fun, but I was relieved last summer when things picked up enough to allow me to re-settle in Atlanta, where I now live in a lovely house near Piedmont park with some of my favorite people in the world. We compost, I cook when I'm home and have sort of taken over two closets (apparently leos have a lot of stuff). I still travel a lot, but it's nice when I'm gone to remember that I have a home out there, a lovely bedroom with a memory foam mattress and christmas lights on the wall. I'm about to release a new CD, which is technically my 3rd but also the first full length I've recorded since going full time with the whole music thing. I think recording an album is kind of like falling in love -- everyone around you is doing it all the time (especially when you're a full time musician and so are a lot of your friends), but when it happens to you it feels like the largest, most singular and important occurrence of all time and space. But I'm! Recording! An! Album!! It's very exciting. Hope you're doing well out there and that I get to see your pretty face smiling in some dimly lit theater, pristine acoustic listening room, dingy dive bar, college coffeehouse or campfire circle sometime soon.