Eleanor Underhill
Asheville
Eleanor Underhill tried her hand at a variety of instruments—piano, trombone, guitar, and ukulele—before settling on the banjo, the instrument that has defined her sound. At age 14, she composed her first song and has since amassed a vast catalogue of music that has supported the creation of five albums with various projects. Her unique open-back banjo style, salty-blues vocals, and prolific writing ability has contributed to the success of her band, Underhill Rose, who has toured nationally and overseas while garnering international acclaim on the Americana scene since its formation in 2009. She has also won top honors at Asheville’s Songwriting Idol Contest, played on a Grammy award winning song by Kid-Hop artist Agent 23 Skidoo, was selected to perform in the Asheville All-Star Band in the summer of 2018, and is a Deering Banjos endorsing artist.
Though collaboration has surely been the cause of much of her success, Underhill felt the burning desire to get her hands on the dials and take a song all the way through the process of writing to recording to producing to mixing to release. In the fall of 2016, Eleanor holed up in her parent’s restored mill house with her modest collection of recording equipment and began tracking a full length album of original material. With the help of a Regional Artist Project Grant, Eleanor released her first solo album—Navigate the Madness—in the fall of 2018. Leaning on the talents of several Asheville musicians (many of them in Eleanor Underhill & Friends) she has created a work that is more adventurous and singular than anything she has done before. Navigate the Madness was named a Top 10 Local Release by Mountain X-press and a Top 100 Album of the Year by WNCW listeners.
In 2021, Underhill was featured on the cover of CenterPiece Magazine highlighting a live performance called "Echo Sessions" filmed at Echo Mountain Recording Studios and broadcast statewide on the North Carolina Channel. Despite the chaos and reckoning of 2020, Underhill released a second album, Land of the Living, to positive reviews, premieres, and national radio airplay. American Songwriter premiered the kick-off track, "Didn't We Have Fun?", and Musoscribe called the album a "Best of 2020" release. Underhill also ambitiously crafted music videos for every single track and a full-album movie (available on her Youtube channel). While in the throws of the pandemic, Underhill decided to launch a Patreon page to allow fans to support her efforts in return for exclusive content.
After years of encouragement by her fans, Underhill has finally recorded an album comprised of fan-favorite cover songs: Got it Covered. Returning to her home studio, she began tracking in the pandemic winter of 2020. Bringing in regular members of ‘& Friends — Zack Page on bass, Silas Durocher on guitar, Jacob Rodriguez on saxophone, and Will Younts on kit — enabled Underhill to capture the magic that the group has cultivated over years of live shows. A whopping sixteen tracks are the result of a multi-year process that brings listeners from austere acoustic tracks to bombastic re-imagined renditions of some of the most beloved songs of all time.
Eleanor Underhill’s tracks
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