PHOTOS: Heather Koepp
STYLING: Brittny Moore
MAKEUP: Michelle Miller
HAIR: David Gardner for Exclusive Artists using Phyto Paris
LOCATION: RagDoll Pink Palace
WORDS: Eléa Weibel
What are your dreams? Are you brave enough to achieve them? Well, Lindsey Stirling certainly is. With her violins, at barely 30 she manages multiple lifetimes of accomplishments: two different tours including one in Europe, an autobiography, and two albums — one that received a Billboard Music Award and one that is the #1 holiday album in the country. Before going on tour again and releasing her deluxe album ‘‘Warmer in The Winter,’’ on her highway to success, she kindly took the time to speak with us here at Grumpy Magazine.
I started this thing not to be the most successful person with the most followers. I started it because I wanted to create and make art
If you don’t know Lindsey Stirling, you may wonder what exactly she does as her main activity: she simply composes songs. And then she plays them expertly on her violin, while dancing. She has merely managed to create an entire new genre of music in her early twenties, willingly mixing hip hop with violin. Her inspiration sprouted from a common frustration: she couldn’t find what she wanted in traditional songs. She nearly even dropped violin and chose not to study it in school, because she didn’t want to ‘‘play what has been played for hundreds and hundreds of years, the way it had been played for hundreds of years.’’ She decided to create her new style, something she would want to do. Her first original song, Spontaneous me, came out not long after. She then uploaded song after song, ranging from covers to original music she created. About one year after it all started Crystallize came out, a song that would change her life forever.
People weren’t just requesting covers from me anymore. And that’s when I realized that my life was probably going to change
Crystallize was not just new because it mixed dubstep with violin. It was new because it was a song she composed and it was doing insanely well. Today it’s sitting at 206 million views on YouTube, 6 years after it went online. In her words, ‘‘people weren’t just requesting covers from me anymore, people were like ‘play Crystallize, write more dubstep, write more electronic music for violin’ and I thought, ‘oh, people like me for what I actually love to do’. And that’s when I realized that my life was probably going to change.’’ Yet, the path to success wasn’t guaranteed. She was becoming popular, but, according to her, she knew little about how to write songs. And yet, she wrote songs anyway, and she now describes it as ‘‘something magical.’’
GRUMPY MAGAZINE 