Retrospective Episode 3: Kylie Brock and The Gael

The Mountain-Ear Podcast

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Kylie Brock has been singing for as long as she can remember. She first started singing with her mother in church, even though she jokes that they turned off her microphone until she got older. Along with her mother, her brothers were also musically inclined, so she had a family of musical influences to inspire her. She also cites many Motown and Soul influences throughout her life, including Stevie Wonder, Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley, and Aretha Franklin. Brock currently performs mostly covers with a few of her original songs scattered throughout. She’s currently starting to test the waters when it comes to her original material, even though she’s been writing her own material since she was around eight years old when she started dabbling in piano for the first time.
The Gael, which is Gaelic for “Forest Dwellers,” originally started as part of a bluegrass jam in the early 2010s, and their original name was Live Music. The group evolved from playing old-timey music and bluegrass to focusing primarily on Celtic music, and they describe their music as Celtic/Eclectic. The four original members – Bill Ikler, Laura Fisher, Debbie Smiley, and Phylleri Ball – started performing together in 2016, with vocalist Arwen Ek joining shortly after. However, The Gael isn’t the only experience that the members have had with Celtic music. Ball played piano in a Celtic group in Pennsylvania for seventeen years before moving to Colorado. She now plays both keyboard and button accordions and the bodhran (Irish drum) which greatly enhances the Celtic tunes. Fisher brought a repertoire of music from hammered dulcimer players across Colorado to the group. Ikler previously played guitar in the band Tryptych with a similar Celtic/eclectic vibe, and Smiley played violin when she was younger before dropping it and picking it up again 25 years later. Fisher primarily played the piano and flute as a child and learned the hammered dulcimer much later on. Ek played in a Led Zeppelin cover band and had a stint as a singer-songwriter before joining The Gael.

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