Indie pop singer and songwriter Summer Gill has spent her life immersed in music. Well-known around Stuart as a duo with her dad, folk artist Ken Gill, she is the granddaughter of a piano teacher and niece of a rock guitarist. Every family get-together is its own Gill music fest, she says. Her earliest musical memory is standing on her grandmother’s stairs with a guitar-shaped pillow singing Shania Twain’s “Feel Like a Woman.”
Now she is a woman, and at 20, making a name for herself in a different sphere – pop music. Standing behind her keyboard, she has spent her summer entertaining crowds from the Kilted Mermaid in Vero to the recent Dancin’ in the Streets festival in Stuart.
This fall, she will release her first recording, “Stormy Weather,” a seven-song EP recorded at Stuart’s Rain Cat Studios; it will available on iTunes and Amazon. The songs are her original music, picked from more than a dozen she has written.
The recording sessions were funded by a Kickstarter campaign Gill launched in April. In less than three weeks she reached her goal of $2,000, and went on to raise another $895 to help with distribution and marketing.
Last weekend, she picked up the final mix of the EP and headed to Tallahassee where she’s finishing up her last semester as a media and communication studies major at Florida State University. A Bright Futures scholar, she is graduating a year-and-a-half early.
Writing songs mostly about relationships, she hasn’t yet mined this anecdote: She was secretly baptized in the sink of a restaurant kitchen in Tortola.
Her parents, Ken and Michele Gill, ran the restaurant and the inn next door. They didn’t find out for 14 years when they went back to visit and the chef, still on premises, confessed to being so incensed at their decision not to baptize the baby that she whisked Summer into the kitchen and did it herself.
Ken himself orchestrated the baptism-by-fire that launched Summer into the music world. Gill, whose day job was as a biology teacher at Port St. Lucie High School, had his then 11-year-old daughter join him on stage at Fort Pierce’s Harbortown Marina to sing a song – KT Tunstall’s “The Other Side of the World,” she recalls. “The owner wrote me a check for $25.”
That was a year after she was stricken with fear singing the same song at her fifth-grade talent show and “pretty much shaking the whole time.”
Stage fright behind her, she and her dad started learning more songs together. “Whenever he’d have a show I would go up and sing with him.”
Within a year Ken and Summer Gill were booking gigs together.
Summer played keyboard to her dad’s guitar. A classical piano student since the age of 7, what she really wanted to learn now was how to accompany herself as a pop singer. At 14, she found the perfect teacher in Peter Jones at Stuart’s Starstruck, a pre-professional arts academy. “Piano didn’t come as naturally as singing. Doing them together was like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.”
Summer learned to imitate songs by listening to them while reading the chord charts and lyrics.
“Peter has one of the best musical ears I’ve ever heard,” she says.
“It was usually the first time he ever heard the song and he would immediately be able to play it.”
Her lessons with Jones continued until she graduated from high school. But there, too, she had a great experience, singing in Jensen Beach High School’s award-winning Jubilate Choir. “I really credit the choir with helping me develop my ear for harmonies,” says Gill. “I was in the second alto section, and we always had the weird parts – we didn’t have the melody line that everyone could latch on to.”
As she was checking on college scholarships online, she came across the National YoungArts Foundation, which offered week-long scholarships in the arts to study with master teachers in their discipline at its Miami campus. Gill applied to the regional competition.
“I sent in my four videos and kind of forgot about it. Then a few months later I got an acceptance packet in the mail.”
Her final concert there, backed up by musicians and dancers from the competition, was one of the high points of her performance experiences, she says.
While she still plays with her dad, for the past year she has also performed with Deal James, a young musician from St. Louis who moved to the area three years ago. They teamed up musically a year ago, and are now dating. They met when he walked into Rain Cat Studios on a day she was recording the song “Ocean Heart.” Together they have opened for some of the touring bands at Terra Fermata. And he has been a “massive, massive help” getting her album out, she says, largely by waking her up to get the studio on time after late-night gigs. “Honestly, it would have gotten done but probably not until December of next year.”
