Today on the show, I chat with Kara, a Celtic singer, and musician who also shares her love of traditional Celtic arts with her many adult students. She also started ballet a few years ago and is about to get en pointe for the first time.

We connect on so many levels as teachers of adult students about the notion of it being “too late” or of a person being “too old” and about expressing ourselves in the arts at any age.

It’s really a touching conversation and Kara’s kind and passionate soul will absolutely encourage you to chase your dreams, whatever they may be.

Enjoy!

Photo Credit on Thumbnail Photo: James Sterling Photography

Kara’s Intro and Important Statement on “Being Too Old”

As a teacher, myself for music lessons, I think it's so important to remind adults, that you're never too old to start something. You're never too old to continue something, you're never too old to start as a complete beginner.

I love teaching adult students. The first question I feel like I always get is, is it too late for me to start the time and time again. So society is putting this idea into people's heads over and over again. And I think that it's not just from a point of view of even starting something new, but just even the idea that you're always too old, you're getting older, you're getting too old, you're going to be old, is just this constant thing we hear in society. And I think it's really sad because my adult students are tremendous. They're amazing. Every lesson, they come in 150% focused because they're making the time for this in their busy schedules, they're paying for it, they are deciding that this is what they want to do. And I'm not saying that children can't be super driven and focused because of course they can be. But there's a big difference between your parents telling you, you're going to go to your lesson now. And you being an adult person with a job, and hobbies and maybe a family or whatever, being busy, and deciding I'm going to make time for this.

Julie: Welcome to the show. Kara. I'm so excited to have a chance to chat with you today. What fun to be able to sit down together.

Kara: Oh, yeah, I've so been looking forward to this. It's gonna be so much fun.

Kara: So I am a vocalist and I also play the fiddle, which is just a violin I get asked that a lot. So I feel like it's always worth mentioning fiddle and violin are the same instrument. You will typically hear people in folk music, any kind of folk music, call it a fiddle, whereas violin is typically more going to be assumed that it's a classical or an orchestra type of musician, maybe jazz, you know, not always everyone's different. But definitely in the Celtic world, you play fiddle. You’d very rarely hear someone say “Oh, I play Irish violin.” No, you you play fiddle. I play also a little bit of tin whistle. And I'm learning to play a very, very unusual medieval instrument called the hurdy gurdy, which is a crazy thing to obtain basically, you can't get them ready-made. Someone has to build them for you. There are only like a couple people in the world who make them. So it's very interesting.

Julie: So you mentioned you've been performing since you were a kid. Did you start all of these things when you were a kid? I know you started the What was it called again? The medieval instrument. You started that now?

Kara: Yeah, I started that just recently the hurdy gurdy. So, I guess the backstory that probably brings it all together is that my father is a professional musician, and has been since he was a teenager. So I grew up basically, he has a recording studio as well. So I grew up being in the recording studio with my dad. From the actual time I was a baby because there are home videos to prove this. Home videos of tiny Kara, like playing on the keyboard with my dad, and my mom in the background being like, let the baby sleep. So my father's background is actually more in like 60s and 70s alternative rock. He played a lot of like King Crimson, Purple Harem, a lot of like British bands, kind of like almost psychedelic like alternative rock, he was a Hammond B3 player. Which is awesome, because I do actually we were talking the other day about pop music and me saying I don't listen to it at all.

Probably like the most modern music that I listen to on a regular basis that is not Celtic or World is like a lot of still the 60s 70s stuff that I grew up listening to my dad play. But yeah, my dad switched over to start playing Celtic music in a Celtic band when I was probably maybe around six or seven years old. So I grew up from that age with pretty much purely Celtic music. And that was the age that I started playing the violin, I had a couple of years of classical training and then switched over to traditional Irish fiddle for the rest of my life. And as far as singing, just for as long as I can remember, I would sit at the piano with my dad and, and sing and never took formal lessons as a vocalist. Because it's not always the sound that you want, as a traditional Celtic vocalist, I guess. Lessons improve everything for everyone, and I've learned and grown a lot over the years, but a lot of vocal lessons are taught kind of as more of a classical or opera style of voice and that's really different sound than you want as a traditional Celtic folk vocalist anyway. Yes, since I was a little kid basically, with those things. And then you know, over the years, pick up some other things as I've gone.

Julie: And you did Irish dancing at some point in all of this. Is that true?

Kara: Yeah. So growing up with river dance being a huge part of my childhood that was kind of like the famous show for anybody in traditional music. Well, for a lot of the world that was their first taste of any kind of Irish dance or music culture. I was absolutely obsessed with river dance and with Irish step dancing from a young age, but pursuing the musical faction of it so much, I only really had little bits of lessons here and there. Sometimes we play a lot of Irish festivals and things like that, sometimes there I'd get little bits of lessons or workshops. But I started actual formal dance lessons in my mid-20s. So you know, very much an adult, very much an adult for that.

Julie: So you are a musician. This has been quite the year for musicians. Last week, we had another musician on the show as well. What a year for musicians. Are you still teaching at this point? Are you still performing? What is your musician life look like in this world?

Kara: Yeah, it's crazy. It has been really a tremendous year, I think not just for musicians, but any kind of performers, anyone in performing arts and entertainment, I am very, very grateful that I am still able to teach and have been teaching since the pandemic started. just completely online. So I have hardly any people, if any, given how things look in the area at the time coming to meet in person.

Now, I do have the benefit that I teach out of my home. So I'm not in a public space, so if I do have one person who feels comfortable coming from time to time, and we both feel that that's safe to do, we wear masks, you know, we sit apart and it's not like I have a waiting room or that I have a bunch of people coming in and out. But for the most part, all of my students are Skype and Zoom. Now thankfully, I've always had Skype and zoom students because I have a couple of students who are out of state.

So for me, it wasn't a tremendously difficult crossover to make, since I had already been doing it to some degree. But there's a huge difference, of course, between all of your students being online, as you very well know, I don't have to tell you, and you know, having just a few from time to time.

As far as performing, no, the last gig that I had with my full four-piece band was in March of last year, March of 2020. We shut down here right before St. Patrick's Day, which is, being a Celtic band, one of our busiest times of the year, followed by summer for summer festivals and concerts. So we had been fortunate to get in a large concert right before shut down because a lot around here anyway, I don't know what what it's like in other places, but a lot of places try to stagger their St. Patrick's Day concerts because there's a lot of competition.

So we were able to get that in right before the call came that it had become a pandemic and that stay-at-home orders were starting to be put in place. So other than just a few live stream types of things here and there infrequently. No, I haven't played a normal show since March. And that is bizarre. I probably have not been able to say that since I was a little kid, a little girl at that. It's been this long since I played a normal show.

Julie: So you have an interesting mix of starting dance and music as a child and as an adult, and some self-taught and some trained. A