Melissa Greener

Nashville based singer songwriter Melissa Greener has that distinct equine quality of being able to magnify and reflect your senses back at you, forcing you to confront, and surrender to them. A seeker through song, she fixes her gaze inward only to discover the universality in us all; dancing the blurred line between the defects and the divine. "Greener paints superb portraits of the human condition" - Maverick Music Magazine Whether fronting her folk-rock all-girl-power-trio, duo with drums, or solo-electric, she is at once magnetic, delicate, fierce and tender. Her voice lulls and soothes all the while soaring over the cinematic effects of a sometimes raucous electric hollow-body guitar. At the root of Greener's expansive sound are her songs which summon their truth from mountain ranges, holy places, deserts, oceans and forests, or the lonely stretch of blacktop from Old Route 66, to the Golden Gate, to the Tappan Zee. Musically, Greener's influences are as vast as the high desert plains before there were borders, before the west was won. Born an alien of the Motor City's however alluring cacophony, Greener was first enamored with the jazz vocalists that crooned on the late night WDET radio station in Detroit. Beside those standard torch balladeers, other early inspirations were the Laurel Canyon and Greenwich Village songwriter scenes of the 1960's and 70's; then later, Texas poet-writers like David Rodriguez, Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams. Years living in Austin left a permanent mark on Greener - in psyche and in song - so much so that Guy Clark took her under his wing as a co-writer in the last years of his life. A combined love of modernist poetry, bohemia, and the modal D tuning on her sometimes raucous electric tremolo guitar gives Greener her unique approach. A natural horsewoman from the age of two, Greener has ridden all of her life and identified with the sensitivity, and mystical spirit of the animal. She has trekked mountain ranges in the Alps, Slovakia and Tibet. She's pedaled a bicycle solo across Canada, and lived in a rural village in China. “I once sailed so far into the Mediterranean Sea I couldn't see land, and have seen so many stars in an Egyptian desert I couldn't see the sky.” Her current adventure is a full-time international touring schedule.