New Bedford Guide Your Guide to New Bedford and South Coast, MA
On Friday night, Febuary 24, Harvard educated and award-winning singer-songwriter Mieka Pauley will join local singer-songwriter Rebecca Correia to perform at the UGLY Gallery on Union Street in Downtown New Bedford.
Originally from Boston, Pauley comes to New Bedford with an impressive resume. In 2005, she won the Starbucks Emerging Artist competition, and in 2008, she won both Cosmopolitan’s StarLaunch and the New York Songwriters Circle Songwriting Competition.
She has also appeared on Daytrotter, a website that features live recordings of up-and-coming artists such as The National, Bon Iver, and Death Cab for Cutie (before they were up-and-comers), as well as on BBC London and PRI Mountain Stage.
According to Pauley, she currently resides in her car, but she plans to return to Willamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, in April. Williamsburg is widely known as the unofficial capital of the indie-hipster music and art scene in New York.
Pauley returns to the area after performing at several of Rebecca Correia’s “The Dream” concerts at her parent’s house in Rochester. “I love the area,” she told me when I interviewed her via the Internet.
Pauley was born in Boston, but moved away as a young child. As a young adult, she returned to Boston to attend Harvard, where she entered the Cambridge music scene. When I asked her about her experience in Boston, she told me that she was too young to remember it as a child because her family left when she was so young, but she has fond memories of the area as an adult.
“My memories are school, street performing, moving apartments every year, harsh winters, and an amazing music scene. Harvard has a great art and music scene—I still keep in touch with and work with a lot of the artists I met there. For example, I regularly cover a song by my buddy Noam Weinstein (“When I Get My Shit Together”); another friend Jessica Kaye made a short film based on a song of mine (“Devil’s Got My Secret”); I just played a school where my former choir-mate Daniel Roihl is musical director. The school itself (Harvard), and the degree I received allowed me to take chances that I don’t think I would have taken if I didn’t have such a solid safety net.
Rebecca Correia, a Rochester native and part time resident of Nashville, Tennessee, came to know Pauley through her cousin Amy Correia, who is also a touring musician.
Correia had a lot of good things to say about Pauley. “Meeting Mieka has absolutely been positive for my career. She’s a super intelligent woman with a great business sense and a very hard worker. She is a nonstop living, breathing artist! When you watch someone’s career unfold as I have watched Mieka’s, it’s inspiring. She has quite a music resume to her name, and she achieved it by being talented, working hard, and never giving up. She’s a captivating artist and everyone will get to see that on Feb 24th!”
The UGLY Gallery (U Gotta Love Yourself) is owned and operated by Dave Guadalupe and Jeremiah Hernandez. Generally, UGLY’s main focus is on tangible artwork, (they usually have a new exhibit for most AHA! events) but they also host shows that they hope will help spread word about a budding local music scene, amongst an eclectic variety of other endeavors.
Past performers include the New Bedford based band The Tree, hip-hop act Blest Energy, and classical guitarist Peter Arteaga. The go-to DJ for a lot of their events is DJ Farenheit, who incorporates projected video into his show, and DJ a Tom Called Cooney has also spun there, as well as a few other local acts. They also host a freestyle cipher every AHA!.
The guys at UGLY are very excited about the upcoming event. “Mieka is an amazing talent and I can’t wait for her to grace the gallery. Rebecca is a blessing to the Southcoast and deserves every thing she has earned over her career,” said Hernandez, a good friend of Correia’s. “We’ve (UGLY and Correia) been trying to work together since the day we opened, and this opportunity to have Mieka Pauley play as well sealed it for me.
Tickets for this Friday’s show are available at UGLY or thru Rebecca Correia. There is a Facebook event created here.
Mieka Pauley – All The Same Mistakes – Music Video
