www.danawylieband.net

Dana Wylie’s songwriting is an international affair. Her band’s debut album includes songs written in such diverse locations as a gambling boat in the South China Sea, the windswept clifftops of Cornwall and the depths of a Winnipeg winter, to name but a few. The band’s music ranges from blues and cabaret through soulful pop to folk and roots, embracing both rural and urban sounds. Although Dana and her bandmates hail from rural areas on opposite sides of the Atlantic, it was in a bustling Asian metropolis where the band had its first incarnation.

After several years of singing “other people’s words” as a music theatre actress, Dana turned her focus to writing and performing original material, moving to Asia for a quiet respite from Canada’s theatrical scene. In Taiwan, she was instead plunged into a lively music scene, playing solo at corporate functions, with David Chen’s Muddy Basin Ramblers, leading her own bluegrass outfit The Wylie Brothers, and forming the Dana Wylie Duo with Englishman Jeremy Hellard.

A singer/guitarist, drummer and virtuosic harmonica player, Jez had been performing both solo and with a number of bands all over Taiwan when he met Dana in a Taipei music shop. After a year of performing both as a duo and with the Wylie Brothers, Dana and Jez decided to move to England to concentrate on their music full time.

This they did. Over the next two years they played nearly two hundred gigs in pubs, clubs, barns, fields and festivals, village halls and community centres, even people’s backyards and living rooms. From the Applecross Peninsula in North-Western Scotland to London’s legendary Jazz Café. They also self produced their debut album, ‘Almost There…’, released in the U.K. in 2006, and found the perfect bandmate in double-bass player Nye Parsons.

Nye has developed a formidable reputation as a jazz player over the last decade or so, playing all over the U.K. with innumerable bands both as a regular and stand in member. His lyrical melodic style hovers somewhere between jazz and folk and perfectly complements Dana’s fluid songwriting.

Ever the travellers, the Dana Wylie Band have relocated to Canada where they continue to explore both musically and geographically. They are scheduled to record a second album in November following a tour of Western Canada.