Greta Gaines

Born to writer and outdoorsman Charles Gaines and visual artist Patricia Ellisor Gaines, musician Greta Gaines spent her childhood on a rural farm before enrolling at the Northfield Mount Hermon School in western Massachusetts and later earning an American studies degree from Georgetown University. She did not begin composing songs until age twenty-two yet progressed rapidly enough to forgo law school in favor of a music career. An accomplished athlete as well, she relocated to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she maintained a dual focus on competitive sports and vocal performance, ultimately capturing the Women’s Extreme Snowboarding World Championship title in 1992. That victory led to her role as co-host of the 1997 men’s and women’s Big Air Snowboard Competition at MTV’s Sports and Music Festival. Still committed to singing, she relocated to Nashville and secured an agreement with Giant Records, only to emerge with forty unreleased masters after the deal collapsed. Undeterred, she founded her own imprint, Big Air Records, and issued her self-titled debut album in 1999, drawing its tracks from the earlier Giant sessions; that same year she performed on the Village Stage at Lilith Fair. In 2001 she scored director Joe Maggio’s independent feature Virgil Bliss and starred in the Oxygen Network series Freeride with Greta Gaines, which ran for three seasons; her second full-length, It Was Hot, followed in 2004. Additional television work included segments on ESPNOutdoors’ BassCenter and The New American Sportsman. The 2006 EP Can’t Kill the Flavor, produced with assistance from her brother Shelby Shook and his band the Pengwinz, marked a shift away from the Southern country-rock of prior releases toward more studio-centric arrangements of instrumentation. Whiskey Thoughts, released in 2008, restored the hard roots/Americana approach, a direction reaffirmed on the widely praised 2013 album Lighthouse & the Impossible Love. Following that record she stepped back to raise her sons while serving on the advisory board of NORML and as a public representative for Women Grow, organizations advocating cannabis legalization. The 2016 election prompted her return to songwriting, yielding the 2017 seven-track EP Tumbleweed. Recorded in Nashville with longtime collaborator and engineer Eric Fritsch, the release examined themes of nostalgia and individual liberty.