Event

Jenny Lou Drew

Born and raised in the backwoods of Maine, Jenny Lou Drew (BMI) is a self-taught musician who produces and performs entirely by ear. Her parents were avid Mother-Earth-Newsers who worked tirelessly to build a post and beam home for the family from wood harvested by oxen from the property. Her father erected the house in-between pulling graveyard shifts at the paper mill, and Jenny credits her whisper-like timbre to days spent on hush-mode. While her mother painted with Bob Ross and her father tried to sleep, Drew spent countless hours of her childhood whispering her songs and melodies into a 1970s boombox tape-recorder.

At the age of 15, Drew was invited to open for a local biker band at venues and hog roasts throughout New England. At the age of 16, she was cuting her teeth at venues like Raouls, The Bitter End, and the infamous Party Behind the Barn. In 2007 her self-titled record with the project, A Moving Train, garnered nods in international rags Jazz Times and Keyboard Magazine and made several nominations in the Phoenix Best of Polls.

After a hiatus into higher education and hobby homesteading, Jenny Lou Drews latest works have been collecting accolades from near and far, including a 2019 win at the Maine Songwriters Association annual songwriting competition for the song "Mending Fences, a nom for Best in State in the 2019 New England Music Awards, and four places in the semi-finals of the International Songwriting Competition. Her music is in regular rotation on Maine radio, and has hit the airwaves on WCLZ, FRANKFM, WBLM, WCLZ, NPR, WMBR (MIT), and WMPG.

Songs Jenny Lou Drew has written have made the semi-finals of the globally respected International Songwriting Competition on four separate occasions, once for every year Drew has submitted to the ISC. Out of over 26,000 entries worldwide, the semi-finalists of the International Songwriting Competition made up only 9 percent of total submissions in 2020. Jenny was the only writer from Maine to make the first cut in 2020, and we are very happy to welcome her to Skål!