Snowden Set to Perform at Southampton Arts Center

[caption id="attachment_57085" align="alignnone" width="800"] Jennifer Lee Snowden will perform at the Southampton Arts Center on Saturday, November 5.[/caption]

By Michelle Trauring

Jennifer Lee Snowden doesn’t remember the moment it happened. All she remembers is the coat closet of her childhood home in small-town Michigan.

It was small and cramped. But inside it, she could see them—the orchestra, her orchestra, following every command of her tiny hands as she conducted them and sang along.

Her mother and grandmother, who were both music teachers, didn’t have the heart to stop her. In fact, they encouraged it.

“So, basically, my family is like the von Trapps—everyone was singing in eight-part choral harmonies,” Ms. Snowden said with a laugh during a telephone interview while her husband, Nico, drove them through the Italian countryside, where they were recently visiting for a long weekend. “I came from a very musical family. It was one of those things where I saw the love for music and what that could create since I was a little girl.”

Music became her life force, she recalled, and she would go on to learn piano and find her signature jazzy sound while living in Manhattan, which she will bring to the Southampton Arts Center on Saturday night, she said.

Ms. Snowden typically starts every performance with “When It Rains,” she explained. She wrote it while living in Australia about seven years ago, after several months of rain nearly every single day. The weary weather gave her quite some time to read, think about life and enjoy her own company—not wishing it was sunny, but instead appreciating the beauty of a rainy day.

“A lot of my songs I write from a place of heartbreak, or it’ll be something that comes out naturally,” she said. “But this was actually a song that I really thought about and I wrote from a happy place, which is not as easy to do, typically. At least for me. The melancholy songs come a little more easily.”

She would learn this lesson the hard way. During her freshman year at Northwestern University, her good friend’s brother committed suicide, sending her into uncharted territory—both musically and emotionally.

“It was just one of those things that was so difficult for me to understand, and it was such a loss,” she said. “I come from a very small town so everybody knows each other and knows their families, and it was just so sad to see my friend go through that and to think about somebody losing hope and ending their own life.

“And so I didn’t really know how to express those feelings,” she continued. “I sat down at the piano and started to play, and it just came out naturally—all those feelings that had been inside that I couldn’t necessarily articulate to my friend came out through music.”

She performed the song, “Eternal Wire,” then for her father, and just several weeks ago, her newest song, “Our Father,” dedicated to him for his 60th birthday. On both occasions, he found himself misty eyed, she said.

“He’s the one who has encouraged my music the most. I think i was a junior in high school and I said, ‘You know, I think I'd like to go to Stanford and study law,’” she recalled. “And he looked at me like I had four heads. He said, ‘You know, you seem to really like the arts. Perhaps you should consider studying what you love.’”

Every other day from her apartment in Manhattan, Ms. Snowden gives her neighbors a free concert, as she writes music while playing her keyboard. Her songs come from an organic place, she said, typically inspired by past experiences and, most importantly, real life and real human emotion.

“We need that. We need that voice. We need people to stand up and say something and to be brave and to acknowledge their own deep feelings, no matter how vulnerable it may be,” she said. “Because that’s ultimately what helps us feel and it may inspire someone else or help them through a situation they’re going through. There have been times in my life where music has really carried me through, and that’s the case for so many people.

“I think the more that people feel, the more that they think about something and are conscious, that can only be a beautiful thing for the world.”

Jennifer Lee Snowden will play a concert on Saturday, November 5, at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Arts Center. Tickets are $20 and $15 for seniors. For more information, visit southamptonartscenter.org.