Biography
When Willow Willow first surfaced on San Francisco’s singer/songwriter scene in 2002, audiences were immediately drawn to their delirious harmonies, breathless songwriting, and magnetic stage presence. Using only a single acoustic guitar and two angelic voices, Jessica Vohs and Miranda Zeiger blended folk, soft rock, and classic pop while folding in the rhythmic lilt of Brazilian samba and the modal textures of British traditional music. Their self-titled debut, issued on the Mod Lang label in early 2007, earned praise for Zeiger’s gently moody, lushly romantic compositions and positioned the duo as an act worth watching.
Born four months apart in Albany, California, a bedroom suburb just north of Berkeley and Oakland, Vohs and Zeiger met during kindergarten and remained inseparable, singing and performing together through grammar school and at Albany High School, where they shared choir duties. Vohs, who also sang with the Piedmont Girl’s Choir, frequently brought songs back for the two of them to perform. Their instinctive gift for close-harmony singing emerged early, with Vohs taking the lower lines and Zeiger the upper parts. The pair began writing original material as children, their vivid imaginations and playful curiosity distinguishing them from classmates. Reflecting on their enduring bond, Vohs recently observed, “We’re still best friends, even though it sounds silly for 30-year-old women to consider each other best friends, but we’re very much like sisters. We’re very close; it may be a past life thing, but who really knows?”
As the eldest daughters in modest families, the two shared early memories of listening to Madonna at Zeiger’s house, lip-synching to videos and inventing dances. They were equally devoted to the Beatles and fantasized about lives as performers, shooting short home movies with Zeiger’s video camera, scripting dialogue, and laying down vocal tracks on a portable recorder to accompany their homemade television parodies. In hindsight they have wondered how such experiments might have fared on YouTube. Zeiger’s father, Jerry, a blues guitarist and songwriter, often interrupted their play by launching into impromptu blues numbers; only later did the girls appreciate his skill. He purchased Miranda her first guitar and taught her the fundamentals, after which she continued on her own.
The duo’s initial public performance occurred during a high-school choir project when they sang an Indigo Girls song. Around the same time they discovered The Silly Sisters, the album by Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span and June Tabor, whose English harmonies and a cappella ballads still appear occasionally in Willow Willow sets. After traveling through Europe in 1999 and 2000, they returned to California and were struck by the Moore Brothers’ close-harmony folk-pop at Albany’s Ivy Room. The Moores offered to help secure gigs should the pair decide to perform publicly. Soon afterward, newly christened Willow Willow—after a song by Arthur Lee’s band Love—opened for the Moore Brothers at Berkeley’s Starry Plow. Promoter Eric Shea invited them to the Monday Night Hoot at San Francisco’s Café du Nord, where fellow musicians began requesting them as openers. “We never tried to score gigs,” Vohs recalls. “We had a strong word of mouth buzz and people called us up wanting to book us.”
The duo cultivated a local following at rock clubs and were featured at San Francisco’s free Strictly Hardly Bluegrass Festival in 2005. Later that year they stopped into Mod Lang Records in El Cerrito seeking recordings by Mellow Candle and Vashti Bunyan; owner Paul Bradshare, intrigued by their tastes, invited them to open for Bart Davenport. A friendship developed, leading Mod Lang to release Willow Willow’s debut album in 2007. While still maintaining part-time employment, Zeiger and Vohs intend to tour that autumn with their band—Zeiger on guitar and lead vocals plus harmonies, Vohs on lead vocals and harmonies, Josh Miller on bass, and Paul Burkhart on percussion. Zeiger also began studying piano in 2007; their next recording, a 7-inch 45, will pair Vohs’s composition “Hummingbird” with a new piano ballad by Zeiger.
Born four months apart in Albany, California, a bedroom suburb just north of Berkeley and Oakland, Vohs and Zeiger met during kindergarten and remained inseparable, singing and performing together through grammar school and at Albany High School, where they shared choir duties. Vohs, who also sang with the Piedmont Girl’s Choir, frequently brought songs back for the two of them to perform. Their instinctive gift for close-harmony singing emerged early, with Vohs taking the lower lines and Zeiger the upper parts. The pair began writing original material as children, their vivid imaginations and playful curiosity distinguishing them from classmates. Reflecting on their enduring bond, Vohs recently observed, “We’re still best friends, even though it sounds silly for 30-year-old women to consider each other best friends, but we’re very much like sisters. We’re very close; it may be a past life thing, but who really knows?”
As the eldest daughters in modest families, the two shared early memories of listening to Madonna at Zeiger’s house, lip-synching to videos and inventing dances. They were equally devoted to the Beatles and fantasized about lives as performers, shooting short home movies with Zeiger’s video camera, scripting dialogue, and laying down vocal tracks on a portable recorder to accompany their homemade television parodies. In hindsight they have wondered how such experiments might have fared on YouTube. Zeiger’s father, Jerry, a blues guitarist and songwriter, often interrupted their play by launching into impromptu blues numbers; only later did the girls appreciate his skill. He purchased Miranda her first guitar and taught her the fundamentals, after which she continued on her own.
The duo’s initial public performance occurred during a high-school choir project when they sang an Indigo Girls song. Around the same time they discovered The Silly Sisters, the album by Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span and June Tabor, whose English harmonies and a cappella ballads still appear occasionally in Willow Willow sets. After traveling through Europe in 1999 and 2000, they returned to California and were struck by the Moore Brothers’ close-harmony folk-pop at Albany’s Ivy Room. The Moores offered to help secure gigs should the pair decide to perform publicly. Soon afterward, newly christened Willow Willow—after a song by Arthur Lee’s band Love—opened for the Moore Brothers at Berkeley’s Starry Plow. Promoter Eric Shea invited them to the Monday Night Hoot at San Francisco’s Café du Nord, where fellow musicians began requesting them as openers. “We never tried to score gigs,” Vohs recalls. “We had a strong word of mouth buzz and people called us up wanting to book us.”
The duo cultivated a local following at rock clubs and were featured at San Francisco’s free Strictly Hardly Bluegrass Festival in 2005. Later that year they stopped into Mod Lang Records in El Cerrito seeking recordings by Mellow Candle and Vashti Bunyan; owner Paul Bradshare, intrigued by their tastes, invited them to open for Bart Davenport. A friendship developed, leading Mod Lang to release Willow Willow’s debut album in 2007. While still maintaining part-time employment, Zeiger and Vohs intend to tour that autumn with their band—Zeiger on guitar and lead vocals plus harmonies, Vohs on lead vocals and harmonies, Josh Miller on bass, and Paul Burkhart on percussion. Zeiger also began studying piano in 2007; their next recording, a 7-inch 45, will pair Vohs’s composition “Hummingbird” with a new piano ballad by Zeiger.
Albums