Rooted in the Americana tradition of cowboys, train-hopping and front-porch picking sessions, San Francisco-based Ula's sky-reaching harmonies and thoughtful lyrics will dive deep into your soul.

11 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Americana, FOLK: Traditional Folk



Details:
Conceived on the East Coast and born in the West, San Francisco-based Ula has drawn a loyal and enthusiastic following of smiling faces and shuffling feet. Their music is rooted in the Americana tradition, and includes influences of bluegrass, western swing, cowboy tunes, and all-around folk, however you fancy to define it. All of Ula's songs, both those they've written and those written by others, tell a story. Some conjure up a moment in a personâs life, others bring to life a moment in history, one that often seems both long-gone and startlingly immediate. Hearts broken, love spurned, the pain of homesickness, the passion and heartache of long distance love, the weariness of daily life. The songs they sing, old and new, have emerged out of the human experience, out of a necessity to express through music these things that we all share.
Erin Lashnits (guitar, banjo, vocals) and Sarah Hipkens (guitar, vocals) met in New Haven, Connecticut in 2000 while singing Bulgarian a cappella folk music in the Yale Womenâs Slavic Chorus. Their voices first merged in the unusual time signatures and dissonant drones of Eastern Europe, but soon they discovered their mutual love of good old American music and began to get together to pick and sing over the din of banging heaters and whooping partygoers. Ah, those golden bygone college days. Together, Sarah and Erin trekked and bused through the mountains of Bulgaria, learning songs from women in rural villages and braving the chilly waters of the Black Sea. Then, Sarah graduated and moved to Berkeley, California, while Erin still had a couple of years left in the windy city of New Haven. It was over the course of several weekends together in the Hipkens cabin on the Maine coast that the first seeds of what was to become Ula were planted. The first set lists developed from songs Sarah had sung with her dad, a musician with an incredible knowledge of Americana music. He taught them about yodeling and gave them a glimpse of the depth and breadth of Americaâs musical history. On those lovely Maine days they scratched out the beginnings of guitar solos and harmonies, and from there emerged the question: âCould we really start a band?â

Yes. In January of 2005 Erin left the bone-aching cold of Massachusetts to join Sarah on the new frontier of California, and now they are Ula. So far the Bay Area has embraced their music, and they plan to continue sinking in their roots and spreading their branches, digging up old tunes from the great American songbook and adding plenty of their own.


Ula is Erin Lashnits and Sarah Hipkens.