Bio – Rachel Bowen
I was born in a small welsh town called Mountain Ash in south Wales. That’s where the seed of my interest in music was planted from nights of listening to Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Neil Young, and many more fantastic artists with my folks and little sis. My parents had great taste in music and always took us to concerts and festivals when we were younger, so I’m not surprised that I would sing all the time. I’d be singing as I’m walking down the street, when I’m doing the dishes, in the bath. I’d be making up little songs to myself but never would tell anyone what I was doing. I always thought that if I told anyone I wanted to be a songwriter, they would think I was mad, so I stuck with my other creative outsource which was art. I joined the school choir and the local town choir to try and understand the art of singing a little better. I was a soprano and also the youngest one there.
After my parents realised that I wasn’t going to stop singing around the house, they bought a guitar for 18th birthday. I taught myself four chords and wrote my first song called “Seventh Colour of the Rainbow”. I thought about starting off practising with a cover but it seemed only natural to just start writing my own songs. After a few weeks of writing and friends encouraging me to play live, I turned up to an open mic night at the Toucan club in Cardiff. I remember feeling the most nervous I have ever felt in my life. Getting up there and playing something that I had written and was personal to me was terrifying. I played three songs with my legs shaking so much that the guitar kept slipping away from me. It was a terrible performance but had its rewards. It made me realise that I wanted to do it again, and I absolutely loved every minute of it. I remember wanting to run back home that night and start writing another three songs for next week.
I moved to Swansea to start my degree in Illustration, but music was always coinciding with my degree. I would try to incorporate my words in some of the illustrations and projects we were doing I realised that I was having a battle between the arts and needed to focus on either one of them but subsequently stopped doing both my art and music. I kept my hand in stuff here and there, doing various illustrations for people and getting gigs now and then, but I never stopped writing songs.
I entered a singer/songwriter competition in Swansea with Stewart Cable as one of the judges. I entered with Under the Weeping Tree and won a home recording system. I was starting to develop a large catalogue of songs and gigging on a more regular basis, but didn’t have any kind of professional recording of my songs. I have been wanting to record my EP for a couple of years but it kept getting delayed for various reasons.
At the beginning of my Uni degree, I met my partner Alex. He has been my constant support when I have started drifting away from what I need to do. He’s has been the one to give me that nudge in the right direction as I’ve noticed that being creative, does mean you tend to drift alot.
I was starting to feel like I was in limbo and didn’t know which direction to go in. Alex had the idea of moving to the Netherlands and live somewhere completely new. At first I was very unsure about the move, but moving from Wales to Maastricht all made sense to me a month ago when Alex suggested I’d write to Emiel van Egdom. I walked away from our first meeting feeling excited and eager to start working on my EP straight away. I have been working on my first EP and we are now coming to the final stages. It has been a long time coming and I am looking forward to finally having a finished product. The songs are sounding great and Emiel has captured everything I wanted in EP. I have also been extremely lucky in that the one and only Charlie Green heard my songs and offered to play trumpet on “Ballerina and the Clown”. It has been an exciting few weeks as the missing puzzle pieces all seem to be fitting into place. The EP should be ready for release towards the end of December.
