Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sierra Drummond. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Sierra, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

I think about this topic a lot. I’m in my late 20s, still objectively young, but this industry seemingly idolizes youth to extreme measures, qualifying, from my perspective, women’s achievements particularly by their proximity to youth. And I don’t think uplifting youth is an inherently wrong practice, entertainment is one of the few industries that takes young people seriously, and I’m inspired deeply by my younger peers. Still, our culture’s obsession with youth has, at times, left me with a constant fear of falling behind in my output of music, and in the development of my career.

However, I know I started my creative career at the right time, because physiologically, I could not have started it any sooner, as I had a prolonged vocal cord injury that prevented it. And spiritually, I don’t think I had developed the emotional depth to do so either, as I don’t think I had really experienced life in all its twists and turns yet.

I started taking music seriously again, when my experience working for the Peace Corps in Thailand abruptly ended in March 2020, and I moved back in with my very musical family in California. I had undergone vocal cord surgery a few years prior, but while busied up by starting a life after college, the scar tissue was left with not enough time to heal, and music still felt unfeasible.

The pandemic’s pause in normal life offered me the first space I had to fully heal, and within a few months of living at home, I started recording my first EP with my dad. Now, I’ve written 30 more tunes, and make a living each week performing and teaching music. However, I find myself not putting out music with the same cadence I was afforded during the pandemic. Pursuing music now feels like a constant battle of doing it to make a living, versus doing it to build a career. And I’m hoping, this year, I can take greater leaps towards building my career, rather than just making ends meet with odd musical jobs. Still, after years of being physically unable to express myself through singing, any opportunity to perform still feels like such an immense gift.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hello! My name is Sierra Drummond, I’ve likely been a musician since the womb, as I was born into a family primarily defined by their musical abilities. So, in a way, I grew up in this industry, albeit, the version I saw was certainly not always the most glamorous. While my parents, Burleigh Drummond and Mary Harris, are the 2 most talented and passionate musicians I’ll likely ever have the privilege to perform alongside, their journey with music was complicated by an amalgamation of bad deals and bad luck.

Prompted by protective love, they sort of gently dissuaded me from pursuing a career in music, especially when they saw my academic achievements rewarded later in my childhood and teenage years, and even more so when I injured my vocal cords after excessive and improper use in high school. Still, when I circled back to music during the pandemic, after years of aching for it, my brother, father, and mother welcomed my musical enthusiasm with open arms (or rather, open ears). We started regularly playing together as a family band, hosting live-stream shows, and recording our family album under the moniker, “Tin Drum Family Band.” I started teaching private ukulele, guitar, and piano lessons in kids’ backyards from a distance (a hilarious task to perform with already easily distracted 7 years olds).

As Covid protocols started to ease, I started singing for tips, table-to-table, with my talented brother, “Burleigh McDowall Drummond,” at a famous steak-house in Malibu Canyon called the “Old Place,” and at its neighboring winery, “Cornell Wine Co.” This no-frills, honest way to make some money playing music, in this old-school “strolling minstrel” fashion, pulled me out of whatever shell was left to protect my ego, and put my music on exceptionally vulnerable display. These experiences prompted my name getting passed around for a variety of freelance work, I started getting hired for private parties and community events, by more families to teach, and all of a sudden, I was making an actual living playing music. This gave me the ability to move out to Hollywood with my multi-talented comedic, and also musically skilled boyfriend, “Danny Levy” who I now sing and host shows with regularly. I’ve played in a variety of bands, on either guitar, keyboards, and now surprisingly, primarily bass.

Now my weeks consist of combining my past academic experiences in education, and my ever-growing love of writing and performing music. I teach music at an academic enrichment program serving unhoused and lower-income families in the valley, teach private lessons from my family’s home in Thousand Oaks, and perform at “Mommy and Me” style classes for babies (*surprise babies LOVE classic blues and rock). I still perform and host shows regularly at Cornell and the Old Place, and am usually hired to play a variety of instruments for varying churches and organizations throughout the weekends. I deeply enjoy collaborating, writing, and recording with other local artists, and performing in their various bands, at shows throughout LA and Ventura County. Through all these experiences I’ve found that my greatest passion is arranging and writing music, whether it’s for other people or for myself. And, while it is, at times, the least lucrative, this year I am dedicated to carving out more time and space to record, produce, and put out my giant pile of unreleased music. I’m also yearning to curate my specific sound and show further, and to bring my music to new spaces. I know I need to break ever so-slightly away from my routine, to give my music its best chance at a life outside of my little world and head. And I feel immensely lucky to have people in my life who are willing to help me do so.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I think ultimately, there is so much unpredictability in life, so much tragedy, and so much loss. Really, there is no excuse to not do the thing you love most, there are so many people who will never get to pursue their dreams, what excuse do I really have to avoid mine? A huge guiding light in my decisions to pursue music was the loss of my close friend, and cousin, Darcie Peña. I’m not only driven by the unrelenting support she showed for me when she was with us, but by the notion that I have to live the life she doesn’t get to. A few years before she passed, Darcie, her sister Ashley, and I were in New Orleans, for my sister-in-law’s Bachelorette Party. I don’t typically subscribe to a lot of these practices, but somehow, we wound up getting our tarot cards read, and boy did that tarot card reader read me down to my most minute insecurities. It was a few months before I was set to move to Thailand, and the reader told me, without any clues provided by me, that I was leaving the country to avoid my art, to avoid my writing, and to achieve something that I felt could be perceived as more “noble and valid,” but was really just an “act of hiding.” My family doesn’t hesitate to remind me of this occasion, and I’m grateful for it.

I guess my mission is to make them proud, to make more music for my cousin Chelsea who plays the song I wrote for Darcie, called “Signs” every night to help her 2 year old son fall asleep, to show my brother Burleigh how his songwriting inspired so much of my own, to say all the things I don’t know how to express otherwise, about the nuances of being a woman, of being a partner, or loving people who are troubled, or wanting the world to change but feeling disillusioned that it ever will. A year or so after my family lost Darcie, I wrote “Signs,” and performed it for a man sitting alone at the restaurant I regularly sing at. When I finished, he told me he lost his brother that day, 3 years prior, and for maybe the first time, it felt like he was sitting there with him again. I guess my goal is to never withhold art from the world that might have the power to connect us when we need to most. Life is lost so quickly, so we might as well give life everything we’ve got.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

In an effort to lighten the mood, I’d just like to say, on behalf of so many creatives, a lot of us really hate standing in front of a camera, or editing a video on a tiny screen that hurts our already strained eyes and ears! It’s also easy for me to complain about, because I’m also bad at it! But alas, I will continue anyway.

While social media is such an important facet of developing indie artists career now, and has platformed so many talented artists, and in many ways, also disabled some of the grimier gatekeeping aspects of the music industry, please please please don’t exclusively utilize algorithmic social media platforms and streaming services as your only method of music discovery!!! Go outside! Listen to a busker! Go see a local artist perform. Go outside the big city, and into tiny towns in places like South Alberta (I say that because my distant cousin, Duncan McDowall, hosts an amazing small folk festival there called “Beaver Fever” that my family has the distinct privilege of performing at every year). The best artists I’ve ever seen are the ones who don’t have the time and resources to always afford studio time, or buy a little ring light and come up with clever hooks on why you should stream their song. My brother is one of them! Go listen to his EP “Salt Creek,” follow him on social media, even though the only thing he ever remembers to post are cute pictures of his kids.

On behalf of artists who aren’t naturally inclined to online self-promotion, try your best to hear music in its rawest, most primitive form (as in LIVE and in person). I’m performing all the time, but lack the technical inclination to capture it in a way that translates well to the IG and TikTok world. It also feels criminal to reduce a song to 15 seconds at times, but alas, I didn’t mean to do this interview to whine and there sure are some good 15 second hooks out there on the internet. (Please just go see live music, and make an effort to find music outside your Spotify “Daily Mix”.) Anyways, I’m complaining from the belly of the beast, so please also add my songs, especially my newer tunes “Oblivion” and “Toast,” to your Spotify playlists.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/sierradrummond
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sierradrummond/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sierra.drummond.7/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sierra-drummond/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sierradrummond806
• Other: https://sierradrummond.bandcamp.com/, https://www.tindrummusic.com/sierradrummond

Image Credits
Lauri Reimer Chris Garcia @ctgxphoto Daniel Levy