Early in the summer of 2007, I received an email from Catherine Ellis in Kalamazoo, inquiring whether I’d like to get together to play music.  She’d heard of me through a mutual musical friend.  It took us until September to actually meet and play music together for the first time, but once we finally did, we both knew that there was potential here for some great collaboration.  A couple of rehearsals later, we were joined on a few tunes by Catherine’s partner Alma Muxlow, and the band which would become Carmea was born. 

Catherine has played in a number of bands, and has a solo CD, Time Again (2000), to her credit.  She is a singer, song-writer, and guitarist.  Alma plays mandola and mandolin as well as percussion and a bit of acoustic-electric bass, and sings and writes songs as well.  And I’ve been a singer forever and a cellist for a very long time; additionally I play fiddle, recorders, Melodica, a bit of ukulele, a bit of electric bass, and some percussion, and I’ve been writing songs since 2001. 

Our very first gig together was on the Day Stage at the annual Women in the Arts Festival in East Lansing in November of 2007.  Less than a month later we performed again, at Goldenrod Music’s annual Holiday Open House, in Lansing’s Old Town. 

Soon after those first two gigs, I created a file folder for organizing music and other papers related to this fledgling band which as yet had no name.  I labeled the folder CARMEA, an acronym I’d made up of all of our first and last initials.  Months later, when it was time to get serious about finding a name for ourselves,  I googled ‘carmea’, and discovered that this word that I had made up in a utilitarian moment was in fact a form of a Latin word meaning song, poem, or incantation.  Perfect!  Once that discovery had been made, it did not take us long to agree that we had found our name.

Now it is the end of November 2009, and as I write, our debut CD Raining in Yosemite is in the mail, on its way to us from the manufacturer!  It will be available for purchase at all of our shows coming up, along with CD download cards and Carmea T-shirts.  We are very excited!