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 Photo by Mark Mushet |
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Veda Hille - What is the story? Veda Hille was born in 1968 in Vancouver Canada. She started playing piano when she was 6. Her family moved around a lot, from the city to the country and back again. Veda ran around in the woods and the streets, practiced piano, read books, and thought that maybe she would be a psychiatrist. First she played classical music. Then came pop music, then a few years of jazz. There was the ill-fated year as an inept lounge musician. Then Veda went to art school. The Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver. She studied sculpture, film, and performance art. She also worked as a cook. She began to get a handle on the idea of making things. She put that idea together with the music idea, and started writing songs in 1990. It became pretty obvious that she would not be a psychiatrist. Veda put out an indie cassette in 1992. People liked it and she started playing around town. She slowly started the business of touring Canada, and also began a long relationship with the Canadian modern dance scene, accompanying class and composing scores. In 1994 she released her first cd, and has released an album roughly every 18 months since then. By the time she started working with her current band (assembled in 1997) she was regularly touring Canada, the US, and Germany, with a licensing deal in Europe with Tradition und Moderne (Bremen). Touring and recording and various special projects have filled all her time since then, and Veda and the band began work on her 10th independent record in January 2004. Veda plays piano and tenor guitar, dabbles in banjo, accordion, and protools, and has a new love affair going on with a Rhodes piano and other vintage keyboards. She writes about the natural world, the constant threat of tragedy, the trickiness of love, and anything else that amazes her. She has an album about the Canadian painter Emily Carr, a suite about the Yukon Territory, and a whole lotta songs about sex and death. She has recently begun writing and directing short films and puppet shows, and performed with the Leaky Heaven Circus as a snowy owl over Christmas 2001. A new interest in musical theatre has led to a collaboration with Toronto playwright Sean Dixon, and a stint as the musical director of Hair in the Yukon in the winter of 2003. 2004 sees the release of Escape Songs, a recorded collaboration with Montreal sonic artist Christof Migone, as well as the new studio record, the premiere of Pearl (a commission from the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in honour of their 30th anniversary), and a host of other projects. Stay tuned, because as Veda freely admits in her music and her life, nobody knows what the heck is going to happen next. For more information download the Veda Hille Press Kit (PDF) |
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