Greta Gaines has always thrived somewhere outside of the mainstream. Musician/television host and Internationally recognized pro-snowboarder and fly-fisherman-- Gaines is a woman set on living life on her own terms.
Gaines comes by her blend of sports and art honestly. Her father is novelist, screenwriter and outdoorsman Charles Gaines (Pumping Iron, Stay Hungry) and the inventor of the game of Paintball. Her mother is painter, sculptor and former Miss. Alabama, Patricia Gaines. "My parents wrote their own rules, so it didn't seem odd to me to invent my life as I went along," Gaines said.
In 1982 in the backwoods of New Hampshire, Greta spent her childhood days with her 2 brothers riding prototype snowboards years before they were on the market. She took up fly-fishing then, singing and acting before attending Northfield Mount Hermon School her last 2 years of high school and graduating from Georgetown University.
By 1992 Gaines was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming snowboarding all day and singing her songs in cowboy bars at night. After taking the Women's Extreme Snowboarding World Championship - the only woman in a field of 19 young men - she moved to Nashville to pursue songwriting and performing full time and soon landed a major recording contract out of Los Angeles. When a merger left her with 40 master recordings she started her own label, Big Air Records, and culled the 12 tracks on Greta Gaines from those masters. Her song "Firefly" got considerable AAA airplay and the album rose to the tops of the MP3.com charts, landing her a slot on the Lilith Fair and opening shows for Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette.
In 1997 Gaines' snowboarding title led to a job hosting MTV's Sports and Music Festival. Her song "Mikey Likes It" was used as the show's theme song. In 1999, the Oxygen Network created Freeride with Greta Gaines. "It was a dream job and reflected my love of music, extreme sports, adventure, travel, lifestyle and the environment." Gaines created the show's theme song and wrote music for the show's soundtrack. Freeride was on the air for three years and led to another TV gig hosting for ESPN 2's Basscenter and The New American Sportsman. Because Gaines owns her own catalogue of some 100 recorded songs, she has licensed her music freely for use on ESPN, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Oxygen Network while contributing to a dozen movie scores. She did the soundtrack for director Joe Maggio's Virgil Bliss, (which was nominated for an Independant Spirit Award) and a song for Ethan Hawke's newest directorial effort, The Hottest State. Greta also acts in the film playing the role of Ethan's wife, Faith.
It Was Hot, the second album for Big Air, was also a success and led to a month of dates supporting Sheryl Crow. "It's scary as hell to stand up in front of an audience as an opening act with nothing but your guitar and your songs," Gaines says. "It's also fantastic. It did a lot for me as a performer, jumping in head first with no safety net."
Gaines' next effort – Can't Kill The Flavor – was a seven song EP and a slight departure from her earlier efforts. It blended acoustic balladry with today's studio techniques to add a bit of radio friendly polish to the tunes without diminishing the heart and soul of her art. Gaines calls it "hick-hop", a Southern songwriter vibe married to the beats of modern urban music. The single, "Honeycomb," a song about the perils and joys of pot smoking, was a hit on internet radio and featured on itunes, Yahoo Music, and Napster homepages. The EP also garnered rave reviews from Relix, Performing Songwriter and High Times Magazines. By the summer of 2006 Greta had no plans to release any more music commercially. She had welcomed a second son and was competing in and commentating on the first ever women's pro-bass bass fishing tour for ESPN when an old friend and collaborator came calling.
Randall Jamail and Greta began work producing the album (for his label Justice Records) that she says she's always dreamed of making—a real hippie country, psychedelic, southern rock record— Whiskey Thoughts, due out in July 29th of 2008. It was a family affair with her infant son in the studio as they worked in East Nashville with longtime band mates (Daniel Tashian, Millard Powers, Eric Fritsch) and featured musicians such as Willie Nelson, Raul Malo, Kenny Vaughn, Bucky Baxter (pedal steel player of Bob Dylan fame) and Jim Bosios, drummer for The Counting Crows. "When I was younger I was always looking for someone's approval. Then I had kids and what I needed from music totally changed. Motherhood just kind of sliced away all self-defeating behavior. I gave this album everything I had to give, my fiercest writing and most emotional singing so I am content and proud of what we created."
Whiskey Thoughts is rocking. It's fierce, as witnessed in songs like "Dirty Blonde," confessional in "Braggart," sexually charged in "The Willie Waltz," and downright funny in places such as the dance-a-long "L is 4 L-O-S-E-R." Gaines is excited to share the new material with a wider audience as this album will be her first with major distribution (Justice Records is distributed through Fontana/Universal.)
"I started out to show the world that women can represent in non-traditional sports such as snowboarding and fly-fishing and have a career singing and songwriting at the same time," Gaines says in conclusion. "I've never been interested in the status quo. It took me 20 years to get here, before anyone saw the link between sports and music. But here I am and I want to be in your Ipod." No matter what Gaines does, she does it with a passion that's downright inspiring and she's invited us all along for the ride with her thrilling Whiskey Thoughts.
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