Featured Artist

Grace Buford – Guitar, Piano, Singer-Songwriter

With an acoustic, folk rock sound, Grace Buford creates an ambiance through her music that envelops her audience. Like reminiscing stories with old friends or going home for a visit, Grace’s music connects her with her listeners through stories in which they can relate. The music she writes and performs comes from her heart and is influenced by people and experiences around her. Where her passion for creating such a connection originates, Grace explains that “My real passion [for music]… comes from something that He [God] has given me and it’s a real joy to be able to use it and create music that has elements of His message in it without it being false.”

Music has played an important role throughout Grace’s life since she was four years old. “My older brother was taking piano lessons,” Grace continues as she shares her story, “and I followed him over to his lessons and sat in the corner and paid attention. I’d come home and try to do what he was doing. My mom got blessed in music. So music has always been a very important part of my life. My mom is a musician as well and she was very supportive of my getting the instruction… She and my stepdad try to come to as many shows as they can. They were at my show in Atlanta last night.” Family support, Grace affirms “is very crucial to me.”
 
Since learning to play piano as a child, Grace taught herself how to play the guitar later in life. She tells of her learning experience, “I picked up the guitar – I guess when I was twenty-eight years old and I didn’t have much of a piano at the time to play and I was feeling really depressed from music and needed to get back into it so I picked up a guitar and some books and listened to a lot of music and tried to copy people. I taught myself how to play. I guess having a music background like with piano made it helpful.”

After learning to play the guitar, Grace began spreading her love of music by teaching voice, piano, and guitar lessons to younger generations. “Teaching music is really my bread and butter right now.” Grace explains, “That’s very rewarding and it’s really great to work with kids and inspire them in their own creativity, giving them the foundation to move on with their own stuff one day and teaching them how to express themselves musically or lyrically. That’s a real joy for me.” Grace continues “I have one student, she just started piano about six months ago and she brought to me a little spiral notebook of manuscript paper because she wants to write down her own music so I’ve been working on transcribing with her… I have another student who is thirteen that I had been teaching guitar and piano to and just recently started working on voice with her because she told her mom that she wants to write music but she doesn’t want anybody else to sing it… So we’re working on it. She’s got to come out of her shell though. I’m hoping eventually that wall that she has of shyness will break away. I know it did with me eventually… [it takes time] “Yeah,” Grace agrees “and experience. I suffered from stage fright for a long time and still deal with battles of getting mentally prepared to perform especially if I’m under a lot of stress. That’s hard to beforehand pull it together for a performance but once I get on stage and once that instrument’s in my hand and I open my mouth it’s like all that anxiety and everything just goes away and I’m able to lose myself in the music or lose all those troubles in the music and just let the music tell the stories.”

In 2006, Grace released her first self-produced CD, ‘Living Stories’. “On that one,” Grace explains, “I had never taken a stab at songwriting until that album.” Most of the songs are based on stories and people that made an impression on her life. Grace continues, “A lot of them are still with us except for ‘Mattie’s Runaway Train’ which was inspired by the movie ‘Tombstone’. I wrote that kind of feeling that Mattie Earp needed a song. I didn’t meet her but most of the other folks that are sung about in those songs are people that are in my life today…’Song for Mothers’ was written about three different women in various points in my life that went through some pretty traumatic events in their lives. How I always deal with those traumatic events is kind of escape from all the anxiety and stress and go decompress in the woods. So that song is about three women that were mothers to me in my life, my own mom included. It was sort of a tribute to them. ‘Watercolor Pictures’ was written for… a watercolor artist – at the time she was eighty-two year old - that touched many people’s lives in the church that I was attending at the time. I just was inspired to write a song for her just to let her know how special I think she is. I debuted that song at church and… it was a very, very touching Sunday to be able to perform that song for the first time in her presence and to move her to the point of tears. It was a beautiful thing.”

‘River’, inspired by her love of the outdoors, is Grace’s second CD. “Lately I’ve just been so busy I haven’t been able to do the hiking that I used to do and to be able to get out … that’s the place that I go to find myself again and find that peace. So part of that album is dealing with redemption. The river symbolizes that redemption, cleansing of the old and looking forward to something new or starting again or just being refreshed. In that album, I did use a segment of an old gospel tune, ‘Down To the River and Pray’ which inspired the theme song of that album. I was listening to the soundtrack of ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou’. That is a great soundtrack. That song I remembered from childhood when we used to get together and sing those old hymns. That was one of those songs that was very moving. Listening to a three part harmony on that album just blew me away, so I took that public domain song and it inspired the title track of the album.”

Another song on “River” is “Muse”, which was inspired by one of Grace’s artist friends. “There are a number of artists that I am friends with... This one artist that I was friends with had taken the time to listen to me and encourage me and support me. I was sitting on the computer doing some research for some local venues to start soliciting my music to and he was sitting in a corner doing a drawing with oily pastels and his hands – as I say in the song – were covered in red, black, and blue. So as he was doing that drawing, I was writing down some lyrics while researching for some places to play. I took elements of that. It was only a period of maybe ten minutes and I took elements of that ten minutes and through the artistry of writing lyrics just came up with a story of a muse. So he was my muse for that ten minutes. Even more so the fact that he’s friendship put me at ease in a time of great turmoil so just having some positive reinforcement and being around someone else who is creatively inclined in a different way was really inspirational to me. And that was the start of my collaboration with artists and songwriting.”

There’s another friend of mine up in Boston who works with - his medium is chalk pastels or pigments - these huge, huge brightly colored pigment chalks that create a lot of dust. They’re very, very dirty” Grace laughs, “He also gets very, very dirty when he’s creating art and I have been in his presence while he’s doing his drawings and noodling around on some songs. Just being in that same creative element inspires a lot of music too. He’s helped inspire a few of my newer songs so both of these gentlemen – two different mediums of art but both equally messy - have been inspirations to my creativity too… it’s wonderful to as I noodle around on the guitar or try out some songs or even just sit and play through things that I know really well that inspires their art too. Some of the images that I’ve painted lyrically and musically have made it into some of my friends’ art so that’s really cool.” Grace even has a piece of artwork, a drawing of a marionette tangled in its strings that was created by one of her artist friends. The artwork was inspired by the opening lines of ‘Tangled in Strings’ where Grace sings that a ‘marionette sits on the shelf’. Grace shares that “It’s very cool to see some of my lyrics showing up in visual form in art… In that song, the marionette, telling it from that character’s perspective, there’s a woman which he was looking to her to save him and untangle him from his mess. She looks at him and sees the mess and wants to untangle it and ends up coming ensnared in it herself. That’s how I was viewing relationships that sometimes can be that way…instead of being a support there and not allowing their things to affect your life in such a way… I think it will make it to my fourth album whenever I’m able to start recording again.”

Grace’s latest album, ‘Cylindrian Virtually Live’ is a compilation of her most requested songs from her performances in Second Life. Second Life is a virtual environment where fans all over the world can enjoy live music in the comfort of their own home. “It helps the fact that I’m involved with Second Life. If I have product to sell at any Second Life related events that takes place in the real world, I have a greater opportunity to sell there. That’s where I tend to move the most product.” Grace, also known as Cylindrian Rutabaga in Second Life, was recently featured in a CNN article ‘Artists visit virtual Second Life for Real-World Cash’ Grace shares her enthusiasm, “It’s amazing the people that are coming out of the woodwork now. With CNN, it’s been a very nice experience and the feedback… has been real positive. They were very, very nice. Probably the best… I’ve been interviewed by local television before where they wanted to compile a story about the negative aspects of Second Life and I just kept trying to steering them back to my purpose for it. That’s what I felt was so rewarding about the CNN interview because they were there about the music and what I do. They were curious and intrigued and very genuine. That’s what made that interview so much better than the others I had with local media.”

Along with performances, songwriting, and teaching music lessons, Grace is also involved with the Atlanta Chapter of GoGirls. Grace performs for GoGirls open mic nights and will be at Homefest at Atmosphere in Loganville, Georgia on Friday, May 1, 2009. Since becoming involved with GoGirls, she has made some great connections. Though she still enjoys performing solo, she was thrilled to be invited to join The Melinda Kingsley Band. Grace shares her excitement “Melinda gave me the best Christmas present ever by texting me Christmas day and asking me to join her band. We’ve rehearsed. We’ve played two shows together and we’ve rehearsed a few times since… I think I started rehearsing with them in February. It’s not been very long and we’re getting together on Tuesday to rehearse and play Swiftwaters [Swiftwaters Fest in Dahlonega, Georgia] the following Saturday [May 2, 2009]. I really enjoy it because I’ve been a fan of Melinda’s music since meeting her through GoGirls. I think even before GoGirls…It’s a real treat for me to have been a fan of her music for over a year to now be apart of making the music. It’s really great.”

Due to her hard work and musical achievements, Grace has met her first dream of being able to support her and her family. Grace states “I’m at the point now where I’m as broke as can be but there’s a roof over my head and there’s food on the table so I’ve succeeded in that. So that’s one goal that I’ve had. I think my next goal would be to be able to reach a larger audience and get some paid bookings with a nice packed house whether it be the big arena would be great but I’m happy with the more intimate venues like what I played last night at Red Light Café [Atlanta, Georgia] or at Barking Legs Theatre [Chattanooga, Tennessee]. It’s that intimate audience. I would love to hear my music on the radio or in a movie or commercial or something. That’d be cool. I know I can’t do this forever. I listened to an album by Carol King and she’s in her seventies still rockin’ on her piano and singing so that was exciting.” Through her music, Grace makes a great impact on people’s lives around her and is reaching out to more audiences through live performances and virtually live performances on Second Life.

Keep on keepin’ on, Grace, and keep on rockin’.

A message from Grace to all her fans…
“Don’t let anything hold you back from following your dream - not even yourself. “