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A Musical Life: Heather Wooldridge

Derek Hildebrandt

Heather Wooldridge is a Wichita-based musician. She plays keyboards with Vehicles and a variety of other instruments in her downtime. She favors soul music and the drums.

“I did grow up around music. I have a very musical family. My parents have played music my entire life.

At the age of five I was first onstage with them. The have a lovely recording of it. I sang ‘Hey, Good Lookin' by Hank Williams, Sr. I remember being so excited about it.

But then, as I got older, I would be so anxious. We would be at family events and my mom would say, ‘Oh, let’s get Heather up to sing!’ I would give her these looks. I would be so mad because I would have told her, before the event, ‘Don’t ask me to sing! I’m not going to do it!’ But, then I would get up there and I would just forget that there was an audience. I would put everything I had into it.

I remind myself that, yes, I’m going to be very, very anxious before. I’ll be making assumptions about how bad it’s going to go. Then I get up there and I just kind of forget that everybody’s out there and I allow myself to feel the music.”

Jedd Beaudoin is host/producer of the nationally syndicated program Strange Currency. He has also served as an arts reporter, a producer of A Musical Life and a founding member of the KMUW Movie Club. As a music journalist, his work has appeared in Pop Matters, Vox, No Depression and Keyboard Magazine.