By Mark Gregory
Editorial Director
@Hear_The_Beard
mark@buglenewspapers.com
While acting is what has made Alicia Witt a face everyone recognizes, it is her voice that has her coming to Chicago later this month.
Witt will kick off her five-city EP Release tour at City Winery on Aug. 22.
The EP 15,000 Days will be released on August 24 — the title marking how many days Witt had lived when she recorded the album.
“I am very excited to have the first EP show of the tour be in Chicago because I have always had some of the best shows I have ever played in Chicago,” Witt said. “They are some of the best audiences.”
For most of those 15,000 days, Witt has been a musician as well as an actress.
She began playing piano at an early age and began competing when she was seven-years-old, the same year she was cast as Alia Atreides in the film Dune.
She even played professionally at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel when she first moved to Los Angeles to make a run at acting.
With more than 30 movies and equal TV shows to her credit, it is obvious the acting was a wise move, but for the past decade, she has been carving a new path.
“I am as much a musician as I am an actor, it just wasn’t what people knew me as,” Witt said. “Now, I have been doing it long enough and have been blessed enough that people are listening to the music, I think it is pretty close to half and half at least. People are coming out, I think, because they like these songs and they know the words and it is incredibly moving to me. It is such a personal way of connecting with people. They are not going to keep coming out just because they saw you in a movie.”
Witt said early on, most of her audience was the curious moviegoer.
“When I started playing shows almost 10 years ago, without question, everyone who came was coming out of curiosity because they saw me in a series or a movie and they wanted to see what that was like in person and I never minded that at all — I think that is an incredible luxury to have when you are a singer/songwriter starting out to have that extra exposure and having the privilege of having people show up even when your music is totally unknown. That was a massive gift and I never took that for granted,” she said. “I have been playing piano my entire life. I started competing in piano competitions when I was seven, the first year I made my first movie. Although I didn’t get brave enough to start putting my own music out into the world until 10 years ago, it is something I always imagined myself doing. It was something I always did for myself and a few select friends.”
Witt got to but her two talents together in 2016 when she played Autumn Chase for 11 episodes of the CMT hit series “Nashville.”
“That was a dream. I had hoped that I would have a chance to be on that show since the show started,” Witt said. “I had actually auditioned for the pilot even though there wasn’t really a place for me. The saw me for the role of Rayna even though they already had Connie (Britton) lined up. It was really just a way of being familiar with me because (show creator) Callie (Khouri) was in the room. At that audition, I sang one of my original songs and [Callie] was so amazing at that audition and she said they would find something for me down the road. Then as time went by, I still kept thinking about it and then out of the blue, I got a call from my agency and my only audition for the role was that they needed a copy of my latest CD.
“That was so awesome. It was such a great show and it was special in the way that none of the actors were cast if they couldn’t sing and all the actors did their own singing.”
Witt’s EP 15,000 days is her fourth release as a songwriter and features songs “rooted in the lessons learned during a life spent onstage, behind the piano, in front of the camera, in love, out of love, and en route from one destination to another.”
While she may have waited to put her songs out to the world, Witt wastes no time letting her lyrics resonate with fans.
“I think what kept me from being confident enough to put this music out or to even write it wasn’t really the worry about could I do it, it was more, will people like it?” she said. “Can I relate to people through songs the way I would want to? Getting to share these songs and connect all the people in the room together is the most satisfying thing I do in my life.”