Depending on which genre she's performing, Dana's voice has been compared to Laura Linney, Karen Carpenter, Amy Ray, Queen Latifah, Kristin Chenoweth, Colleen Dewhurst, Renata Tibaldi, Gladys Knight, Melissa Etheridge, Maya Angelou and Joan Jett.
She stopped trying to figure this out a long, long time ago.
Dana has been collaborating on musical and theatrical projects since childhood. She has these primary musical endeavours:
1. Dana plays guitar and sings rock, folk, jazzy and R&B tunes. She has been a featured artist at open mikes in the Seattle area, but usually just plays with friends when requested at sing-along events. A list of the songs she admits to singing at such events is on her web site, here:
Among those tunes are two originals, one called "Didn't You Know" and one called "Gods and Queens".
2. Dana occasionally plays bass and drums in rock and blues bands in the Seattle area. Most recently, she is playing bass and singing with her friends Bruce Blood, Bill Scott and Jeff Beckstrom in the basement band known as "Blood & Biscotti". Several recording sessions have been completed, and more are to be scheduled before year-end 2008.
Another regular gig for Dana in years past was playing drums with the blues band "Late Summer Purple".
3. Dana sings, acts and plays instruments on stage in theatrical productions, although hasn't very often due to not knowing a repertoire of musical theatre tunes, nor which shows to audition for with which songs. She has done a much larger number of non-musical acting gigs than musical ones. So, at the advice of friends, she recently decided to manage those goals, and is learning 20-something musical theatre tunes for theatrical auditions and cabaret purposes.
Dana has done just a bit of musical theatre before, but her music and theatre projects have usually been separate. So, she's taken the advice of several vocal coaches and friends and comprised a new repertoire of show tunes as of December 2007. She is in the process of learning and recording those tunes and placing them on her new profile at ReverbNation, and offering player widgets to that repertoire on her web site and her Facebook profile.
Her previous musically theatrical projects have included "Angry Housewives" in which she played drums, sang, acted and danced. She was in a concert production of "Godspell" in high school, and in "Dark of the Moon", "Camelot", "Jesus Christ Superstar" and several opera productions in her university days. Her noteworthy opera/art song repertoire included Baba in "The Medium", The Countess in "Le Nozzi di Figaro", and songs such as "Ave Maria", "Zueignung", and especially the rap and classical versions of "Nel Cor Piu Non Mi Sento", and "Simple Gifts", which she uses for pre-show warmup on every theatrical project she's in, musical or not. She is often a source of amusement and comraderie for her warmup use of "The Lonely Goatherd", which she uses to open up her full range via yodeling. :-}
She was in a more recent season of Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan productions - "Trial by Jury" and "The Sorceror". And she's often sung incidental songs in other plays, such as "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" in Sylvia and "Whatever Lola Wants" in a cabaret-style rendition of Deadwood Dick.
4. Dana is a former classical musician, on piano since age 8, cello since age 10, and on symphonic percussion since age 11. She played first chair cello in the Peninsula Youth Symphony during her middle school years in Hampton, Virginia, and studied cello with noted Russian cellist Grigory Belitsky. She also played first chair marching and symphonic percussion in her youth, and played electric bass in jazz band from age 14 on. She earned awards at competitions and enjoyed playing a wide variety of musical styles.
Dana takes no credit for the amazing work he has done since, but is proud to note that one of her first music students was Mr. James Genus, who currently plays bass in the band of the TV show "Saturday Night Live". When they were kids in middle school and high school, Dana got James started, and later hoped she hadn't ruined his chances because she had primarily taught him methods taught to her by Mr. Belitsky for the classical cello. :-}
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For more info on shows that may or may not be musical in nature, please visit Dana's web site, here:
P.S. Dana is testing widgets from her ReverbNation profile, where she is hosting test recordings of her singing show tunes with standard musical theatre backtracks from the Singer's Musical Theatre Anthology and Pocketsongs. Let's see how this works on MySpace:
