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, it was time
to get serious about finding a name for ourselves, and I googled ‘carmea’,
and discovered that this word that I had devised 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!