"I started playing guitar in high school. I lived in a very rural area, and didn't have much to do, and playing music brought something beautiful to my life. It gave me a voice to express myself," reports Melody, singer, songwriter, and producer of "Tangled in Brilliance". At the age of seventeen, Melody put herself and her sister in foster care. She finished high school, and then moved to the bay area to put herself through college. She started to perform in 1995 at a small café in Mountain View CA. "It was really crazy, because sometimes I would be the only female performer, and I would get all of this attention because of it, but what I really wanted to know was, were my songs any good. Sometimes I felt like my clientele wasn't quite right, because I wanted to yell, and cuss, and I kept offending people. Sometimes I felt alone in my angst. It wasn't going over well with the café crowd. And then because I came from a very small town, I didn't know about any underground performers. We didn't even have a grocery store, much less an underground music scene. So I had already been performing for about a year when I learned about Aani DiFranco. It was amazing to hear another woman pissed, and poetic, who didn't want to sound pretty and nice. After graduating from UCSC Melody moved to Albuquerque NM. "Most of the songs for Tangled in Brilliance I wrote in the last three years, many of them in Albuquerque. I was able to live alone for the first time in my life, which meant that I could wake up and write at 3:00 in morning if I wanted to. That's actually how I wrote "So light". I was sleeping, and I had this strange feeling that needed to be expressed, so I got up, and it just came out." "In Albuquerque, I've mostly played venues at café's like the The Blue Dragon, Irish Mac's, The café next door, and Womynfest open mic. I've been performing for almost ten years, and have played for hundreds of people, sometimes with a band, sometimes as a solo musician." Melody is planning to put together a band that incorporates both acoustic and electric sounds. "On Tangled, everything is acoustic, because I'm playing solo, and I can't play the drums(yet). I'm very inspired by bands like the Geraldine Fibbers, Le Tigre, and even the Smashing Pumpkins, and I really want to expand my knowledge of guitar, and experiment with electric options."