Erica Wheeler Headlines Big Sur Land Celebration
Singer-songwriter Erica Wheeler headlines The Big Sur Land Trust’s 30th anniversary event at Sunset Center in Carmel on Thursday, November 20th at 8:00 p.m.
An award-winning musician with five critically acclaimed releases to her credit, Wheeler has been compared to Shawn Colvin and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Indeed she has opened for the likes of Colvin, as well as the Indigo Girls and Greg Brown. Wheeler’s folk, bluegrass and roots Americana songs speak to the land and the people who inhabit it, always with an eye to a sense of place and how that place might change over time.
Wheeler is an ideal choice for this celebration because of what she chooses to write about. Her latest release, Good Summer Rain, is an imaginative, unforgettable journey through the American landscape and the lives lived there. Each song beautifully evokes the relationships between people and place today, from the intimate streets of Greenwich Village to the sweeping vistas of Jackson Hole and reaching out to where farmland gives way to sprawl and wilderness gives way to industrial growth.
Originally, Wheeler entered Hampshire College in Massachusetts to become a wildlife biologist, but she says she “drifted over to the arts and humanities.” Never leaving her naturalist roots behind, a sense of place or a connection to the land and metaphors drawn from nature always figure prominently in her songwriting. It’s only natural that she has expanded her career to include her environmental interests and concerns.
The Big Sur Land Trust event, says Wheeler, “gives me an opportunity in a regular concert setting to talk about land trusts a little bit. Hopefully, the music stirs up feelings about places people love.”
Wheeler often conducts a writing workshop, called The Soulful Landscape, in conjunction with her performances. She says she frequently instructs people who never considered themselves writers and helps them create works that are evocative and reflective of place. During her visit to the Central Coast, she will hold several of these workshops in the community.
Wheeler is no stranger to performing and teaching in places that have suffered a recent natural disaster. She recalls conducting a writing workshop for the Arkansas State Parks after a tornado had ripped through the land. “Usually people will remember stories from their childhood,” she says. “A man did an amazing piece about driving up to a farm, and describing the trees, the house, the front door, even the sound it made when it opened. He was crying when he read it, and it dawned on me that he had lost his home in the tornado.” Wheeler will teach her Soulful Landscape workshop to Iowa flood victims shortly before she arrives on the Central Coast.
She understands that Big Sur is recovering from one calamity while preparing for the next, bracing for the possibility of rain-triggered mudslides this coming winter. She visualizes the vibrancy in that stage of change. “I was out walking with someone who was telling me how her life was in transition and how hard that was,” she recalls. “I thought about how the transitions between the forest and meadow are such alive places, how truly a transition zone is the most alive place.”
Event-goers can expect a heartfelt concert that is at once alive and life-affirming, illuminating and relevant – and of course enormously entertaining. “I like to take people on a journey through different landscapes they’ve never been to,” Wheeler says. “But I also like to spend time in a place and soak up the history, the culture and the people. Then when I do a concert, I tie together my feelings and observations about your place to the songs I’ve written, so there’s a connection there.” She finds that one of the most rewarding aspects of her work is to look out into an audience and realize she is gathered together with a roomful of people whom she’d like to get to know.
Plus, confesses Wheeler, “I go to places I love, like Big Sur, which is always one of my favorites. It rejuvenates me.”