Anj Granieri
From her perch on Cloud 9, Anj Granieri looks back on perhaps the most emotionally wrenching six week period of her almost 30 years and says it was all worth it.
The initial excitement and elation, the occasional doubt, moments of depression — you name the emotion, and chances are Granieri experienced it.
But in the end, Granieri — a singer, songwriter, pianist and poet from Ventnor — crossed the finish line with a smile of pride and accomplishment.
Using a unique, two-year-old Web site called kickstarter.com, Granieri rounded up $15,000 in funding to produce her third studio album, a collection of intensely personal, introspective and original music titled The Giant Unquiet: The Battlefield Between Fear & Faith.
During a six-week campaign that ended last week, Granieri used her social networking stills, periodic updates on the Web and some timely local media hits to reach the goal before the campaign expired on June 8.
A Kickstarter campaign must reach its target in a prescribed amount of time for a project to be funded.
If it goes over the top, the project — which can fall into 13 categories ranging from music, film and fashion to photography, technology and food — is fully funded and contributors essentially become backers — some might even say producers — of the project.
If it fails to reach the goal, though, the campaign ends and backers don’t have to pay the pledges, which is administered by Amazon’s billing process.
Granieri, who’s performed her original music and covers everywhere from Atlantic City casinos to area restaurants and showcases, admits there were huge emotional swings after the countdown began seven weeks ago.
“When we actually launched the campaign, we raised like $4,000 in four days and I thought ... I have this in the bag,” Granieri says. Toward the end, though, she needed to raise about $6,000 in eight days and she had moments of doubt.
Andrea Granieri is young and hip, with a pervasive sweetness that bespeaks someone raised in the gentler, open spaces of Atlantic County. And she's discovering just how much it takes -- in energy, pa...
Dear local musicians, DJs and venues that provide a forum for live, local music: Please excite me, surprise me, be incredible and think big! Or think small — but think differently, think creatively, think funky and think new. I have a music column and I host and produce radio shows, but there have been times when it seemed as though what was available on the local music scene had just skipped town under the radar. Think of this as a two-part request; the first part is an appeal to contact me. Southern New Jersey venues that are not being fully utilized — let’s set up a night of fun and let some great artists and fans enjoy your venue. DJs who are playing beyond the Boardwalk and doing groovy sets in little cubbyholes where...
The guide is destined to soon become the place for local booking agents and promoters to check out local bands and listen to songs and watch video.
The truth is, our region has been a live-music mecca since the early 1900s, when cats like Eubie Blake and Eddie Cantor hung out for summers and performed at local clubs. Decades later the Atlantic City jazz scene was as hot as they come, with internationally heralded performers from Billy Eckstine and Louis Armstrong playing residencies at some of the hottest clubs on the East Coast, namely the venues on Atlantic City’s fabled Kentucky Avenue — all of them are gone now — including the Club Harlem.
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