You know you’ve hit the mark as a songwriter when Elvis Costello’s drummer wants to play on one of your tunes. Local rock ‘n soul vocalist extraordinaire Andrea Gillis got that honor just last month.
You know you’ve hit the mark as a songwriter when Elvis Costello’s drummer wants to play on one of your tunes. Local rock ‘n soul vocalist extraordinaire Andrea Gillis got that honor just last month.
“It’s all been a blur and I still can’t believe it,” Gillis said. The hookup happened when her producer and bassist Ed Valauskas was making the musical rounds in Los Angeles and met up with drummer Pete Thomas, whose association with Costello goes back to 1978. He played Thomas a few tracks he’d been working on, and one that caught his ear was Gillis’ “Last Shot,” which she wrote with guitarist Eric Salt and describes as a “swampy rocker.”
It will be her next single on the local Red on Red label, but she played it live when Gillis brought her band (which also includes drummer Eric Anderson and guitarists Melissa Gibbs and Mike Oram) to Atwoods Saturday.
That’s not been Gillis’ only recent brush with stardom. Last year she fell in love with “I Don’t Need You No More”– a deep cut from the second J.
