For as long as she can remember, Gillian Eichelberger has loved to sing. Now, she gets to do it more than ever as the front woman of the cover band Swifty, named after a certain pop superstar you may have heard of.
She’s got the blonde hair and bangs and is even the same age as Taylor Swift. “We’re both 1989 kids,” says Eichelberger, whose band comes to Journey Downtown on April 26.
“I’m a musical theater kid at heart,” says Eichelberger, whose band covers the music of Grammy-winning phenom Taylor Swift. “So one of my first memories is belting out to all the songs in Les Miserables when I was like two.”
In college, Eichelberger pursued musical theater but struggled during auditions. “I love performing, I love rehearsing, but I just am an awful auditioner,” she laughs. “I just crash and burn.”
Eventually she started finding projects that gave her a better opportunity to shine. She joined a band, sang backup and performed with a jazz group.
“I started to really love storytelling in more of a concert form when I started making my own stuff,” she says.
Now, Swifty offers a mix between Eichelberger’s passions. Performing in a band, with one of the best parts of musical theater: the costume.
Before Swifty however, she wasn’t a Taylor Swift super fan, although, like nearly everyone on the planet, she knew many of her songs.
When she started with Swifty, she dove head-first into Taylor Swift’s extensive catalog. “The more I worked on it, the bigger fan I became. Now I’m full-blown Swifty,” she says.
One of her favorite parts of the band is seeing how the fans react to the music. Although all ages are welcome, Swifty shows tend to attract a younger audience, ages 8-12. “They’re just so happy. It’s exuberant and wild,” says Eichelberger.
From dancing up and down to having kids try and climb up on stage, she says the audience response is nothing like she’s ever seen before.
Taylor Swift super-fans are helpful as well as fun, says Eichelberger. A few times when she’s experiencing a split second of panicked on stage, not remembering the next line of a song out of Swift’s vast repertoire, her audience has been there to sing her through.
But it’s not always easy being one of the six members of Swifty. The band has vocals, backup vocals, piano, bass, guitar and drums, but Taylor Swift’s songs feature many more instruments and electronic music.
“It’s really challenging to recreate, but also play to our strengths of what we can do and how to reproduce that sound in a way that’s true to us,” she says.
Performing also takes a lot of stamina, says Eichelberger. In fact she’s started mouthing the words to the songs while she runs on the treadmill at her gym. “I’m sure every single person at my gym thinks I’m insane,” she laughs.
Although Eichelberger enjoys playing Taylor Swift, she wants to shine a light on the band as a whole. “They’ve figured out how to best represent this music and genuinely love this music as much as I do,” she says.
For information on tickets visit ftpresents.com
If you go …
- WHAT: SWIFTY
- WHEN: April 26, 2 p.m.
- WHERE: Journey Downtown, 308 Main St., Vacaville.
