Lizzie Quinlan and Hannah Martinson first started singing
together on their way to a Kappa pledge retreat when they were freshman. It was
a Nickelback song: Burn it to the Ground. “If we are going to be honest about
what brought us together, it was probably Nickelback,” said Martinson with a
laugh.
They had been singing together for years when in fall of
2012 they decided to make their jam sessions more official. “We were like,
let’s, like, be a band. Let’s have a name and stuff,” said Quinlan, who plays
the harp and sings. They decided to
ditch the name Nickelback Cover Band (NCB for short), and instead went with
River Ran.
The friendship between the two is apparent from how they
finish each other’s sentences. “We thought we should have a name that describes
what our motivations are”…”Where we come from, that sort of thing”…”Hannah grew
up on a river”…”There are a lot of rivers and mountains in our songs”…”One day
I woke up in the morning and was like, River Ran. And then I came to Lizzie and
was like, what do you think about this?”
River Ran now is larger than Quinlan and Martinson. During
winter quarter, violinist Eli Katz and pianist Patrick Kennedy joined the
group, and spring brought guitarist Gabriela Leslie. All five now live together
in co-op king Chi Theta Chi. When asked about how the band came together,
Kennedy remarked, “In all honesty, once we started playing together, I was
surprised it hadn’t happened earlier.” Quinlan, irreverent and sarcastically
melodramatic, responded, “Like all great loves, we wondered where everyone had
been all our lives. It started as a lively stream between Hannah’s voice and my
songwriting, but like the very universe we inhabit, River Ran is ever expanding.” Quinlan’s voice dropped
to a whisper before she began giggling.
Like her laugh, Quinlan’s music is contagious and
startlingly beautiful. When asked to
describe their sound, the group usually opts for folk. “When pressed to describe, that’s what we go
to. It’s folky… It’s harp folky… It’s acoustic… It’s…yeah.” As even the
musicians themselves are at a loss for words, the best way I can describe their
music is warm. It feels like hot chocolate that’s just cool enough for you to
drink but warms you long after you’ve reached the dregs. Their music smells
like pine needles after a rain.
The songs are mainly Quinlan’s. She participated in a
Levinthal tutorial in poetry during the winter, exploring the boundary between
poetry and song. When I asked if she is the primary songwriter, however, she
shrugs off the question, mentioning how she writes some and Kennedy writes some
and sometimes they jam and write together. Martinson disagrees. “I would say
it’s mainly Lizzie’s songs. She’s a phenomenal poet.”
They are blessed to have found each other. “There’s such an
element of luck in finding the right people to play with. That’s been the most
important thing for me,” said Quinlan.
River Ran has performed at Acoustic Jukebox, the Senior Arts
Gala at Bing and at off campus student-run performance space The Red Couch Project in San Francisco. They have recently finished recording their first
song and are hard at work on more.
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