Tracy Eckstrand
From school psychologist to singer-songwriter with her own band
By John Addyman
We all know the moment.
You’re listening to a song, know a little about the situation that’s being sung about and it hits you…a lyric, a line, a word — something that brings you to pause, to remember, to smile or nod your head.
Tracy Eckstrand is trying to make a career for herself; a second career.
She has her doctorate in psychology and spent 30 years in Greece schools as a school psychologist. You can call her Dr. Eckstrand. Many have.
But what’s important to her right now is to be called Tracy. To be recognized for what she is becoming…a songwriter with a knack for laying a memory flat on the table to be looked at, manipulated, considered and perhaps cherished — and almost never forgotten.
She was married for 22 years to Dave Eckstrand. The two sang in a small folk Americana band called Serendipity with Tim Thomas. Tracy Eckstrand had spent seven years before retirement learning how to play jazz guitar because her instructor told her if she could play jazz guitar, she could play anything because there were so many chords.
“We started singing in coffee houses and one of the biggest was the Greenhouse Café. That’s how I got started in a band,” she explained.
Those chords were also the DNA for her new art — in her mind they were collections of words searching for a melody. Her songs, as they developed, wove a story of her life. Her relationship with a dying mother. And the break-off of her marriage.
“You can’t live with someone,” she wrote in a song about the end of her marriage, “no matter how much you love them, if you’re not breathing on your own. Now I inhale. Now I exhale. ‘Cause I’m not, I’m not borrowing oxygen.”
How many people have walked away from a marriage or non-functional relationship and taken a deep breath? She was there. Her song is titled, “Borrowing Oxygen” and it’s smack in the middle of her six-song CD, “Who is Gonna Rescue You.”
Eckstrand, 62, is now a singer with her own band, Tracy and the Accidental Cats.
Like any newbie to a career in show business, she’s struggling for recognition as she develops a second-life career. Learning to play the guitar was a challenge. Developing a stage presence and a small repertoire of her own music was a challenge. Putting a band together was a challenge. Getting music recorded in a fashion that will get notice and airplay is a challenge. Creating a presence for herself and her music — promoting herself — is a challenge.
But if she’s got anything, it’s gumption: organized, plan-ahead, make-everything-as-perfect-as-possible grit.
“I’m a planner,” she said. “I’ve always been. I was the firstborn in a family of four children, with a developmentally disabled sister. I was taking care of my siblings when my father died at age 50.”
She graduated from Churchville Chili High School and went to work as a travel agent “in those days before computers and people booking their own travel. But I always had aspirations to do other things,” she said.
She studied psychology at Brockport State.
“A lot of people said I did that because my sister had developmental disabilities,’ Eckstrand said. “But I think I was just curious about how the mind works and I wanted to understand myself and others better.
“My mom said that I would always be counseling other kids in high school on the back porch. She told me, ‘Father and I knew that you’d either be a writer or something in a helping profession.’ I was very much an entrepreneur when I was young and wrote my own little newspaper, “The Children’s Gazette.” I made crossword puzzles and jokes and took my little wagon around the neighborhood and sold my paper. I charged 10 cents.”
In high school, she had won an essay contest on “Why I Love New York State” that her English teacher had entered without her knowing.
“I got all these congratulations from senators and legislators,” she said.
“There were some signs that I loved to write,” she added. “I also really love people. I’m extroverted. I come from a family of talkers.”
After four years at Brockport, she wanted to become a clinical psychologist, but the big schools she applied to were looking elsewhere for grad students. She ended up at Plattsburgh State and got her master’s degree in school-clinical psychology and took a job in the Greece middle school and she stayed in the district for 30 years.
Four years before potential retirement, she started to line up the rest of her life.
“That was the marking point of a lot of things,” she said. “I asked myself, ‘What’s holding me back? If I live to be 90, what am I going to do with all those years? Who knows how healthy I’ll be?’ That was the thing that made me move forward.”
She decided the marriage with Dave had changed and they were of different minds after 22 years. They divorced.
“Now I have nothing holding me back,” she said, sitting in a chair in her Rochester apartment, surrounded by recording equipment and holding a large and very demanding cat.
“That’s when I met Rev,” she said.
Reverend Kingish, the pseudonym for Steven O’Brien, is a musician. Eckstrand’s abilities with a guitar were becoming better-known and Rev.’s band, Bootleg Hooch, needed a rhythm guitarist. Levon Jones, the band’s drummer, knew Tracy and recommended her.
“I know she can play” he told Rev.
They passed each other in the halls once a week for years at the school where she learned the guitar.
“They thought it would be a good idea to have a girl in the band, too,” Eckstrand confessed.
She joined up and her education started anew.
“I learned a lot about being in a band, about playing with other players, about being on stage and about not freaking out,” she said, sounding like a veteran.
Bootleg Hooch isn’t as active as it was and now Eckstrand has assembled her own band and is building enough of a repertoire to take it to the next level.
Making the journey with her now are solo guitarist and backup vocalist Ray Bellizia, Levon Jones on drums and Eric Davidson on bass guitar.
But making music and having people actually listen to it are two widely different things.
“I have 8,000 listeners a month on Spotify [the digital music-streaming service],” she said. “It’s all about promotion. I’m learning more about the business side of the music than I thought I ever would.”
She writes her music, then records it. Her producer, the musician and engineer who puts her songs in digital form, is Jordan Ruiz, in Los Angeles.
“I’ll play my guitar and record my vocals and send them to him. He does the arranging. He listens and says, ‘I think this song could use a harmonica,’ or ‘This song could use this kind of acoustic guitar beat.’ He doesn’t change my melodies or my lyrics, although sometimes we’ll sharpen them a little, just cut a few words to make it fit the beat of the song. He tells me, ‘This is what I hear.’ He makes me sound good and he’s awesome,” she said.
With the music in hand, the next step is to get it on Spotify to generate some buzz, but the promotion — which Eckstrand is doing herself — is just beginning.
“I’m learning,” she said, pulling out two copies of her CDs. “It’s part of the game in the music business. If you’re an indie artist, they release 100,000 songs a day on Spotify on average. You’re a freaking drop in the bucket if you release a song and let it just sit there.
“Self-promotion is big in the indie world. People don’t recognize you if you don’t self-promote, you’ll maybe get a listener or two from your family. You have to invest some money and a lot of time and energy into it. That taps into my Type A personality: I’m going to do it and there’s the next step.”
About 70% of her time is now spent in promoting. On a lovely Saturday afternoon she was sending out PR materials — a picture, some details about her writing and one song.
She pays a company to connect her to playlisters, bloggers and deejays.
“You submit your song and they come back to you and tell you if it’s right for them or not. You have to target it. For instance, this guy might be playing electric dance music and my songs won’t fit. If a guy plays Americana-folk, my song might possibly fit there. I get rejections and I get acceptances,” she explained.
The result is that her songs pop up in lots of places and that brings people to her on Spotify, where she has 4,000 followers and twice that many monthly listeners. Because she’s still building a song repertoire, her new songs get to Spotify first, so what listeners get is fresh-fresh.
She has started to submit her songs to college radio stations.
“There are so many ways to promote,” she said. “But I only have so much time.”
The Accidental Cats is working with Eckstrand to build the kind of music bank that will meet the 25-song minimum most venues demand for them to get and schedule paying gigs.
Jacob Rakovan, who owns the Spirit Room on State Street in Rochester, has been a supporter of Eckstrand and the Accidental Cats, hosting the release party for her CD.
It’s not a big place and the stage is well back in the room so if a performer jumps off the stage, they’re in your lap.
But the ambiance is neighborhood- friendly.
“What I like about the Spirit Room is that it’s inclusive,” Eckstrand said, shaking her head. “It’s for everybody. Anybody, everybody can go there — younger people, older people. Because it’s near the Holiday Inn downtown, sometimes the Holiday Inn will recommend the Spirit Room. One night there were all these physicists who were in town. Another night there were all these deaf people. I walked in and they were all signing at me. You just never know what you’re going to find in the Spirit Room.”
Eckstrand is now breathlessly charging into her future.
“I don’t know if I’ve hit my groove yet,” she said with her legs and feet under her in her chair. “I think it’s early in my late career, my second career. I really don’t know where my music’s going. I do see a vein throughout my music — hope. That’s part of being a psychologist but also being part of who I am. I’m a first-born child who did a lot of caretaking in my family and I really love people. I want people to be happy and I want myself to be happy. I have a lot of friends and I think that’s built on the fact that I do a lot of listening. I’m empathetic; I think that comes out in my music. I don’t like to end a song on an unhappy note. I never liked movies that ended that way…give us some hope. I think the world needs a lot of hope.”
Editor’s note: To learn more about Tracy Eckstrand and where she’s going in life, visit tracyeckstrand.com.