USD Magazine Fall 2006

So DeMeyer worked in a variety of marketing jobs — in pharmaceutical and high-tech companies —all the while playing music on the side. When she met Saks in 1999, he urged her to follow her dream.“He kept saying, ‘You should play music full time.’ And I said,‘I have to pay the rent, my friend.’ And he said, ‘I’ll help you.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to take anything from anybody.’” She shakes her head, marveling at his persistence. When the couple married, she relented.“He said,‘Just try it for a couple of years, OK?’” So she quit her marketing job. It was a decision she’s never regretted. She’d made what she calls a “homemade CD”with Rossbach — recorded by bartering solo performances for studio hours — and once she was able to devote herself full-time to music, things started to happen. “Within two months, I got a gig opening for Dan Fogelberg, solo (which I had never done before), and Hall and Oates, and I played at the High Sierra Music Festival, and my CD started getting reviewed.” She shakes her head, delighting in the details. “I started getting a lot of opening slots, which was cool. I got a gig opening for Marc Cohn. Bonnie Raitt was in the audience.” Her voice lowers; she seems a little embarrassed. “She came backstage and I got to meet her, which I was very excited about. I was also scared to death. She’d hate it if she heard me say that, because she’s so down-home.” So DeMeyer kept the ball rolling; she admits that her marketing back- ground didn’t hurt. (Her pitch-perfect Web site, brigittedemeyer.com, is proof positive of that.) She got a band together and recorded a second album and “that one was better than the first.” Her momentum was building, assisted by her own know-how. With the help of a better team — including a publicist and a Nashville-based radio promoter — she got radio play, which led to an invitation to play a Colorado festival alongside luminaries like Lyle Lovett and Kenny Wayne Shepard. But it’s the stage she shared with Bob Dylan that let her know she was well on her way. Even though it’s been years since the two played at the same festival, her awe at trodding the same stage-boards as the master is obvious. “I wanted to meet him, but he has this entourage of people who kind of buffer him. Understandably, I reckon, because he’s Bob Dylan, and he’s an icon. I don’t think he probably sees himself that way, but there’s a lot of crazy people in the world, and he needed to be buffered.” When pressed, she shares the tidbit that his fellow performers weren’t allowed to so much as peek out of their dressing rooms if Dylan was

She marvels that she even managed to graduate, given how devoted she was to gigging whenever possible. “The whole time I was in school, I was playing music. I’d have a final the next day and I’d be out until two in the morning.” After one last San Diego performance, at her own

graduation ceremony in 1986, DeMeyer took off for the San Francisco Bay area. She’d majored in international relations because she’d always wanted to become fluent in French; she credits her immigrant parents with spark- ing her curiosity about European culture (her dad is from Belgium, her mom is from Germany). Once in Northern California, she ended up work- ing at a French hotel and didn’t play music for several years. “It was hard, because I didn’t know anybody. I missed it so badly; I was kind of a private guitar player for a while. But I’d sung all through college, and eventually I made some friends.”Through a roommate, she met members of a successful local cover band and started sitting in from time to time. Before long, she met her longtime collaborator, Chris Rossbach, who proposed that the pair branch out and do their own musical thing on occasion. “So we started sitting in with different bands, and we started attending music festivals,” DeMeyer recalls. “We were at one in Telluride, Colo., and the music there was more like what I personally identified with. I thought, ‘I could do that.’ So I said to him, ‘We should start a band together.’ And we’ve been playing together for 15 years.” Though she was making music just as often as she could, she still need- ed to pay the bills.“I was doing what I wanted, but not all the way,”she says with a shrug.“There was all this shucking and jiving just to pay the rent.”

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