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Music

Rita Wilson

Contemporary Music

June 29, 2019, 19.30, Alternative Stage GNO

Rita Wilson

The versatile and restless Rita Wilson is an actor, a writer, and the producer behind major movie hits including My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Mamma Mia. As an actor, she last appeared the 2018 film Gloria Bell, directed by Sebastián Lelio, who won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film for A Fantastic Woman. But her greatest passion is singing, and she has become more and more involved in it over the past six years, not only as a performer but also as a lyricist.

She released her first album, AM/FM, in May 2010, a tribute to her favorite songs from the 1960s and 1970s. Her gifts as a songwriter, and especially a lyricist, became evident in 2016 with her album Rita Wilson, while at the same time she made a series of special appearances with the participation of other artists as well. According to the New York Times, “As a stage performer, Ms. Wilson is gregarious and forthright: a natural entertainer.”

Each song is a powerful narrative that reveals her unique gift for telling stories, culminating in her latest album, Bigger Picture. In this third album, she takes a daring step forward creatively, becoming more personal and confessional than ever before, as she bares her private challenges and talks about them in her lyrics. Every song is a story. Wilson explains that the album’s title track is about “taking stock of who you are and how you got to certain places. As a woman, as a human being, we all consider where we’ve been, where we are, and how we got there.”

Whatever the cost, Rita Wilson is used to opening up and sharing experiences that can help others. She did this with a wonderful article in Harper’s Bazaar magazine in September 2017, in which she wrote, with a sense of humor, tenderness, and honesty, about life after breast cancer.

Wilson’s songs are marked by an intense lyricism and distinct influences from American pop-folk. She’s coming to the Summer Nostos Festival to create an authentic musical atmosphere like you might find in the American South. Though she came to lyric writing relatively late in her long and diverse career, her distinctive style allows her to communicate to her audiences her innermost thoughts and personal experiences. As she told Parade magazine, she once asked her friend Bruce Springsteen, “What makes me think that I, now, at this point in my life, could start songwriting when you’ve been doing it so well all of your life?” and he replied, “Creativity is time-independent.”