Whit Hill - "We Are Here"

Listen to a track from "We Are Here" (mp3) (requires audio plugin)

In the lyrics on her new CD “We Are Here,” Whit Hill takes listeners to an array of places: Sandusky, Ohio; Ann Arbor’s Division Street; I-94, and the sleeper car of a train.

But the soft, twangy guitar on “We Are Here” evokes places far away from southeastern Michigan and northern Ohio, places like Austin and Appalachia.

“It’s firmly rooted in American music,” Hill says of her sound on this first CD by Whit Hill and the Postcards.

Singing and songwriting only begin to tell the story of Hill’s creative side. She is a drama graduate of the High School for Performing Arts in New York City, has a degree in dance from U-M (BFA, 1979) and for many years was the artistic director of an Ann Arbor-based dance company for which she choreographed more than 60 dance and theater works.

Hill, a development writer for the U-M Medical School and also a freelance writer, composes music that falls into the Americana/alternative-country genre. It is a sound clearly influenced by some of her favorite artists, including Lucinda Williams and Buddy and Julie Miller. Some of the tracks on “We Are Here” would be at home on a Nanci Griffith or Iris Dement release.

The most pop-influenced song, appropriately, is an ode of sorts to Hill’s former college roommate, Madonna. On “Maddie,” Hill sings: “Maddie whatcha gonna do with all that money and all that fame? Maddie whatcha gonna do, you can’t never go back again.”

While some tracks lean toward bluegrass, others have a distinct blues flair. That’s not surprising, considering Hill is married to Al Hill, a blues and soul musician who has his own band and also is in the Postcards.
In fact, her husband is partly responsible for Whit Hill’s current musical path. For years, she sang backup for Ann Arbor-based vocalists Jesse Richards and Dick Siegel. But she never wrote her own music.

Then, in 1993, Al Hill gave her a guitar. Around that time, she began writing songs. “It was like a switch was thrown,” she says.

In addition to the music she writes and performs, she also has written more commercial country songs that are being shopped around.

But for now, she is concentrating primarily on her music.

“At some point,” she says, “you have to make some choices. At this point, I want to focus on this band and this music.”— By Katie Gazella, U-M News Service

For more about Whit Hill, visit http://www.whithill.com.