Biography
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Years Active
2009 – present (15 years)
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Founded In
Durham, Durham County, North Carolina, United States
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Members
- Brittany Hölljes
- Elizabeth Hopkins
- Eric Holljes
- Grant Emerson
- Ian Holljes
Delta Rae is an American band formed in Durham, North Carolina in 2009.
Their debut album, Carry the Fire, was released on June 19, 2012.
The band consists of three siblings Ian Hölljes (vocals and guitar), Eric Hölljes (vocals, guitar, piano and keys) and Brittany Hölljes (vocals), as well as Elizabeth Hopkins (vocals), Mike McKee (percussion) and Grant Emerson (bass guitar). They began as a four-piece ensemble and added McKee and Emerson to the dynamic in 2010.
A little history:
Seymour Stein’s office sits way up in the high rises of the Rockefeller Plaza; a corner office, with a beautiful view out over New York City, its surfaces cluttered with all of the memorabilia, awards and accumulated paraphernalia of a lifetime spent in the music industry.
It was into this office that the six members of Delta Rae shuffled one day in the summer of 2011. A rather convoluted connection had led them here to this meeting, their first with a major record label, and no one was quite sure how to proceed. “We were very nervous,” recalls Ian Holljes, with perhaps some understatement.
“But we talked briefly, and then Seymour said ‘Well, why don’t you sing something for me?’” The band duly launched into Hey Hey Hey, a joyous, rollicking tune that begins with an exquisite four-part harmony. Ten seconds in, Stein asked them to stop. The band balked. But Stein stood up, walked to the door and hollered for his colleagues to join them. “You gotta hear these people!” he cried into the hallway. “They sound so beautiful!”
The story that led Delta Rae to Stein’s office, a major label deal, and the release of their stunning debut album, had in fact begun many years before, in the Holljes household, where siblings Ian, Eric and Brittany, enjoyed a childhood that was close yet itinerant, carrying them from Durham, North Carolina, to the Bay area of San Francisco, via Nashville, Tennessee, and Marietta, Georgia. Throughout it all, they relished the continuity of great music — their parents’ record collection, rich with James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Fleetwood Mac, Paul Simon.
Along the way, Ian and Eric forged what they describe as “a close musical bond” writing songs together from a young age. Their younger sister, meanwhile, was in possession of “this huge, brassy voice,” Ian recalls. “When she was young, it was like a lion that you couldn’t quite tame. But as she got older and we got to know her voice we saw the power in it.”
For Ian, Eric, Brittany and Elizabeth it was a matter of working out how best to get their voices, their words, and their sentiment heard. “Playing those early shows, you’re often confronted by half-working sound-systems and weird venues and so you have to find an energy that can at times transcend the music,” Ian explains. “So a lot of times we’d come down off stage and sing something in the middle of the audience, or be screaming out as opposed to singing in order to convey the emotion, to find something primal that will affect people.” Soon earning a reputation as incredible live performers, the band's hope was that if their music was pushed and pulled and tried and tested in front of an audience, then by the time they came to record, the songs would be strong and robust.
The 12 songs on Carry the Fire display the great stew of the band’s own shared histories and influences, as well as those of the land that bore them. There is the richness of Americana, of gospel, bluegrass, blues and pop, but there is also the well-oaked, deep-rooted tradition of storytelling, folklore, mythology. There is a thread that binds together west coast harmonies and the gospel choir, Southern gothic and civil rights, all of the tensions and the joys and the fierce, bright hope of America’s great cultural, geographical, musical journey.
As well as tales of loves lost and kindled and preserved, there are plenty of songs on the album shaped by the shared history of the siblings (and Elizabeth, a friend since childhood) and that celebrate the intensity of that bond.
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