Wintergreen / Nashville
Story By Jennie T. Williams
Ever wonder what the Blue Ridge Mountains sound like?
Track 1, Beautiful Earth, on Seay’s newest record started here. The album, In the Garden, was inspired by the entire world, but it started at Wintergreen.
“I’ve roamed the Parkways and overlooks since I was a kid,” said Seay, who goes by just the one name in her creative endeavors. “My family has had a home at Wintergreen for 42 years. My childhood was spent roaming the woods up there. I got to Wintergreen to unwind – it’s one of the only places I can just and sleep.”
In the Garden was a 2017 Grammy contender and spent 5 weeks on the New Age Billboard charts. But Seay says those honors were never the point of the music.
“The goal was to inspire people and to go out and see the good in life and the beauty in life,” she said. “If people really understood that everything was connected, maybe we would treat each other differently. Maybe there would be less war and fighting if people got that we are one breath, one life, one tide.”
One breath, one life, one tide. Those are lyrics ripped right from We Are One from In the Garden. But they’re bigger than that.
Seay said she wanted to create this album because she noticed that we’re all so wrapped up in ourselves that we don’t always take the time to think about what’s important.
“It’s important for people to go out and walk, go swimming, hike, hug a tree, plant some flowers, breathe the air and thing about everything and stay connected to nature,” she said.
And creating music with that goal has given Seay a global audience (it’s playing around the world and on the Care Channel) that she’s proud to connect with every time they hear her music as well as a global community of contributors, including Grammy winners Ricky Kej from India and Wouter Kellerman from South Africa.
And she didn’t just collaborate with other musicians. Seay worked with her brother, a marine biologist, to use sound recordings of dolphins and whales on Oceanus. So the album really does take from the earth while it encourages listeners to give back.
“Some really wonderful things occurred,” she said. “It had a mission as well as the music being really cool and therapeutic. It sounds really naive, but I think if people slow down, they’ll sense something really necessary for life. We’ve only got one planet – so far – and we need to take care of her.”
More about Seay and her music online here.
Good Article: You have a missing or extra word in the third paragraph: “it’s one of the only places I can just and sleep.”