Singer, songwriter, and pianist Miranda Pennington joined Kaleidoscope host Juliet Fromholt for a live interview and studio session. In the interview, Miranda talked about growing up in a musical family. Her father wrote songs, and she began studying classical piano as a child with one of his friends. After finishing high school, she put her musical pursuits on hold in favor of studying visual arts, until her father encouraged her to return to the piano when she was 26. After buying a piano, she said, she immediately began writing songs.
“I ‘d only ever played classical music, and a little bit of ragtime, at that point. I’d never played any blues or any contemporary music, so I kind of started from scratch. But I had a lot of technique down.”
Miranda also talked about how her training in the visual arts informs her work as a musician. She compared writing a song to sketching an image,
“When you’re drawing, you don’t want to start out with any detail… You make all these little marks all over the place, and you’re looking for the ones that are relatively in proportion with each other, and you strengthen those. I write a song the same way: I sketch it out, and it emerges for me. It’s not a linear process.”
In addition, Miranda described how having a child shaped her career as a musician, leading her to take a 4-year hiatus from performing. More information about her releases and performances can be found on her website or Facebook page.
