EllenShapiro.com | Ellen's Bio

Okay, I lied, this isn't really brief, so I'll give the short version first:

THE SHORT VERSION OF MY BIO
I was born in 1981. I lived in DC for 18 years. It drove me nuts. I wrote, recorded, and released an album in mid-1999. I moved to Chicago in the fall of 1999 to go to Northwestern University. I graduated with the Class of 2003, which means I had no free time unitl a couple of months ago, and I've recently moved to Los Angeles.

THE NOT SO SHORT VERSION OF MY BIO
I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. I started off musically by singing along to pretty much whatever I was listening to, and started taking piano lessons at 7. I quit piano the second my parents let me (age 10), because I really couldn't stand it. Now my mom, Mary Leonard, and my dad, George Shapiro, are really very nice people, but I was kind of pissed at the time about having to take lessons I hated. I think mainly my teacher and I were not well matched, as I'm trying to learn how to play again and it's not as disastrous as I remember it being.

Anyway, I took up the guitar at age 10, and started writing at age 12 when I couldn't get a tune out of my head and decided to make up words for it. The first song I wrote is actually a pretty damn good song. The six or seven after it, however, were not so great. I stuck to it and by the time I hit my senior year at Georgetown Day High School, I had enough material to record an album.

I recorded Bridge Over Bottled Water as my Senior Project. It took about a month and a half of recording in my bedroom to get all 17 songs sounding good enough to me to declare it done. The album was digitally mixed by Steve Steckler of Big Sound Studio, and manufactured by DiscMakers.

After investing my entire life savings plus a large number of birthday presents into the making of the album, it finally came out at the beginning of August 1999. I subsequently toured Starbucks stores throughout the Mid-Atlantic and New England in support of the album.

In September 1999 I began attending Northwestern University in Evanston, IL (right outside of Chicago). I graduated in the Class of 2003 with a B.S. degree Radio/Television/Film Production (appropriate, eh?). I studied like a maniac, which improved my grades, but has kept me from making music as much as I would like to.

Duing summer 2000, I attended Berklee College Of Music's Summer Performance Program and Boston Guitar Sessions in Boston, MA. I received First Runner Up in the SPP's Performing Songwriter Competition. I highly recommend the SPP to anyone looking into being a professional musician.

In November 2000, I was invited to perform at Rockrgrl Music Conference 2000, which was put on in Seattle by Rockrgrl magazine. The conference was absolutely amazing, with almost everyone there being incredibly good and really, really nice. Unfortuately, they haven't had another conference, which is really a shame because it was good fun and really interesting.

I was basically swamped by schoolwork from my sophomore year on, and moving to Los Angeles has thrown a monkey wrench into my plans to have another album out by late 2003. It is now tentatively scheduled for sometime in 2004, with updates to come about when.