When Beachland Elementary students show up for school tomorrow morning, Annie Padnuk and her bagpipes will be there to welcome them with a St. Patrick’s Day serenade.
“My two daughters go there, so I did it last year and the kids really enjoyed it,” the 42-year-old island resident said. “I’ll play outside the school and march around the interior courtyards.”
Later in the day, Padnuk will drive to Sebring International Raceway with the other four members of Kilt the Messenger – the self-described “Celtic punkabilly” band that recently received Grammy consideration for its latest single – for a post-race concert featuring multiple music acts.
She’ll then return to Vero Beach, where the band will spend Saturday night playing at the Kilted Mermaid, the neighborhood bar the band often refers to as its home base.
“We’ve been playing there for a number of years,” Padnuk said. “We’ve got something of a following there, too. But we also play in the Melbourne area, where the rest of the band members live. We’ve played all over Florida.”
Music, she said, is her “jobby” – a hobby for which she gets paid. But the extra cash isn’t enough for her to consider it a job.
That’s why the 1996 Harvard graduate, who majored in religion and spent eight years living at the Kashi Ashram in Sebastian, also works as a private tutor. She specializes in math and helps high school students prepare for the SAT and ACT.
Her husband, Ryan, is a former Brevard County firefighter who now works part-time as a firefighter and paramedic for the Indian River Shores Public Safety Department. He’s also studying to become an acupuncturist.
It was through her husband’s firefighter connections that Padnuk met lead vocalist/guitarist Bob Youhas and the other musicians who in 2009 formed Kilt the Messenger. The band members are all firefighters or related to firefighters.
“Bob was a rock musician who wanted to create a unique sound,” Padnuk said. “He loved the idea of merging the Celtic sound with rock and punk, so when he heard I played the bagpipes, we started talking about putting together a band.”
The band will soon release its second CD, which will include “I Will Not Say Goodbye,” the song that received Grammy consideration in the American Roots Music category but did not get beyond the nomination process.
Still, by having a song submitted to and accepted by the Recording Academy for consideration, Kilt the Messenger members became eligible to purchase tickets to attend the 59th Annual Grammy Awards show on Feb. 12 in Los Angeles.
“It was very exciting just to be there,” Padnuk said. “The biggest challenge for us is that there really isn’t a category for our music. There’s no Celtic punkabilly category. Maybe they’ll invent one.”
Padnuk said the Grammy-considered single – it’s available for purchase on iTunes, and a video can be found on YouTube – is one of the band’s “most acoustic-sounding” songs.
“We do some acoustic stuff, but we go all the way to full-out rocking, too,” she said. “It’s really hard to say we have a typical song, or even a typical sound. We’re pretty eclectic with our styles and instrumentation.”
In addition to the bagpipes, Padnuk plays the viola, mandolin and melodica. She also sings.
It the bagpipes, though, that provide a genuine Celtic feel to the band’s music, which includes original compositions and new arrangements of traditional Irish and Scottish songs.
Padnuk became a “piper,” as she called it, after her and her mother attended the Scottish Highland Games not far from their home in Gloucester, Mass. She was 11 or 12, she recalled, when they watched a pair of sisters win the dancing and bagpipes competition.
“That’s when I knew I wanted to learn to play,” Padnuk said, adding that she already was playing the violin. “I was a member of the only all-female bagpipes band in the country.”
