Continuing on with my series of interviews with recent IMA award winning artists, I recently got the opportunity to catch up with Gina, the front woman of Gina's Picture Show. Gina’s is the 10th Independent Music Award Vox Pop Folk/Singer-Songwriter Song Winner and had a great gig at The Living Room in NYC for a showcase with the IMAs. As impressed as I am ? Read on to find out more about Gina and Gina's Picture Show! Oh, and here's a last minute reminder that the deadline to submit to this year’s IMAs is tomorrow - October 14th!
Tell me a little bit about your history. When did you start making/writing music?
To be honest I can’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t singing. It sounds a bit cliché, I know, but I grew up in a house filled with music. My great grandmother was an opera singer in Italy, my grandfather played music in NY during the big band era, my father was a drummer in the 60’s, and my mother always sang around the house. It was a world carried by music, our record player was always on.
When I was 9 though, I remember specifically asking my mother for voice lessons, than when I was a sophomore in high school I asked my parents if I could try for the Berklee College of Music Songwriters Workshop that summer. A week in Boston, MA living in a small dorm, surrounded by music students… definitely one of the best weeks of my teen years. When I got to college (Berklee College of Music) I got a bit swept away, and I started to have those world-wind life changing moments, or so it felt at the time. Every relationship was more intense then the last, friendships came and went and the only way for me to really deal with life was by writing about it. I let it all out through my songs; they are all true stories filled with secret messages. So I guess the songwriting bit started before college, but I really believe that Berklee and the wonderful teachers there helped me shape myself into a real musician and lyrists.
What do you hope listeners will get from your music?
It’s a bit sentimental to say, but I hope it makes them feel… everything. Happy. Sad. All of it. Each song is a small snippet of my life, a photograph of a moment in time I shared with someone or a group of people. I hope people can share those moments with me and remember their own.
So you’re the 10th IMAs Vox Pop Folk/Singer-Songwriter Song Winner and recently you had a successful night in NYC at The Living Room with an IMA showcase. How have those experiences with the IMAs helped you in your career?
The Independent Music Awards was a really exciting time for us as a band. We really rallied together and got ourselves out there, the VOX POP vote is decided on by the people, so we went to the people. We handed out postcards at shows, on street corners, played as much as we could and became best friends with a few social media sites hahaha. The IMAs is an amazing organization that brings together artists from all over, and has other musicians, both celebrity and your peers, critiquing you. The show was amazing; we played with some great folks and even connected with one band from Ohio that we hope to gig with later this year.
These days, “image” matters just as much as the music (sometimes even more!). How do you balance your image/marketing with your art?
Gina’s Picture Show is filled with amazing people, Jeni Magana (upright bass), Matt Weber (drums), Stoddy Blackall (Keys) and Mat Coser (Guitar). Quirky, bold, honest and spontaneous characters that I would never trade-in for the world, and would never ask for them to change. We market ourselves as a band that “cooks up familiar throw back melodies from the 1920′s to the 1960′s covered in sincere lyrics and served with a wild variety of instrumentation.” We market our imperfections; we don’t try to be anything we’re not. As a female artist there is always pressure and stereotypes from the media, but I try not to harp on those. I wear what I want, and act as I would at a friends house, or the pub, when I’m on stage. I like dresses, I like bowties, but we don’t have a dress code or costumes, we wear what’s in our closet. The most important thing is for your audience and fans to know you, you’re sharing everything with them. Let it be real.
What’s coming next from you that we should be on the look-out for? Tours, videos, new albums?
This winter we are releasing our first full-length album as a band, Gina’s Picture Show. We’re in the final stages of recording it now and hoping for an early 2012 release, maybe even for Christmas if we can swing it!
