NANCE Brody, Mountain Rebel
-Fox Ravenheart



NANCE Brody loves a good thunderstorm:
“It shakes things up.”
You like things getting shaken up?
“Dull is not in my vocabulary, lol,” she tells me.
What needs to be shaken up more in the world?
“The fun light side needs a shake.”


Do you have a mission for your music?

“Not really,” she said. “Just a small town girl enjoying being able to be a musician and have fun with it.”

NANCE invited me to her venue, NANCE Brody's Paradise, this afternoon for our causerie. She’s a simple gal, sans pretension or plans to change the world with her music. Her guitar simply calls her to play. Her venue reflects this: the stage a giant guitar case, based on the worn case of her own instrument—a 12 String Takamine, an old friend she’s had for seventeen years. She tells me they belong together, a gift from a new love in her life, a love that has grown and blossomed like her music, the wind beneath her wings.

And you can hear the love in her music. NANCE composes all her own songs, working prolifically. She’s not sure how the inspiration works:

“Just that when something hits the spot inside my soul, I start writing, can’t really describe it. It’s a process. Usually it’s a strong feeling that something wants my attention to write, then the pen is in hand and the words start coming. The tune is the last thing that comes. Once the words and the tune joins, the magic happens.”

Then she picks up her guitar and finds a nice space where she can pluck it out, letting the music just come.

“I allow the music to tell me where it wants to be, not the other way around,” NANCE tells me.

NANCE describes the flavor of her music as folksy rockin’ blues, her favourite and most fun song being Sweet Evelyn. The song is about a couple NANCE saw while she camped sometime ago on a northern lake in Canada: Vic was Evelyn’s husband—a character who loved to trade things—and the myriad junk of his trades cluttered his trailer site. The song tells the tale of his junk trading ways, the moral being that he traded everything but his wife.

I asked her to describe herself in three adjectives:

“Fun. Lovable. Sexy.”

This also describes her music. Her songs are spirited, joyful, possessing feet to tap and listeners to dance. They can’t cure you of woe, but they make it easier to carry it.

Music’s been with NANCE all her life. She picked up the guitar when she was thirteen, taught herself how to play.

“Yes. I wouldn’t know a note if I fell over it.”

She was born among sibling mountains, her spirit of the northern earth, Ontario, Canada—a wilderness that left its mark of magic on her heart. In her song, one can hear the soar of the eagle on wing, and of course the mischievous fox. She grew up listening to John Denver, Cat Stevens, Anne Murray, those types. She doesn’t talk much about her past, likes to live in the present; she moves constant to the future like mountain winds, her spirit as her music—of fathomed soul on wing.

NANCE is emancipated from vanity, from ego, having struggled through a life of adversity, seeking the pure spirit of her gift and muse; an ego would just anchor her to the earth anyway, slow down her flight.

She came to Second Life in 2007. A decade ago, NANCE wrote a book about online performing and predicted that Second Life would become the primary forum for online performances. Here NANCE has been an inspiration to incipient SL performers; though humble always, she denies credit for the motivation of new artists, who all speak of her with love and admiration. She opened NANCE Brody’s Paradise to have a venue of her own and a place for new Second Life performers to play. She wanted a venue with a magical feel to it.

I asked NANCE what advice she’d give new performers here:

“I probably wouldn’t give them any advice. My experiences might steer them wrong but if they ask and are specific in what they are asking I might share what I have gone though.”

I told NANCE I thought she had the spirit of an eagle.

“Life needs the magical,” she said.

What sort of magic do you see in life?

“I see the magic when I perform especially. I hear people’s spirits lift. I see it in the way they act in the audience. It is pure magic when a room can turn into a happy place.”

NANCE Brody plays weekly at KatRose’s Secret Garden of Live Music, Thursday at 8PM.

Her venue:
* NANCE Brody, NANCE Brody's Paradise , NEW YORK HARBOR (94, 166, 21)