Mirah

Mirah (born Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn) is an American musician and songwriter based in Brooklyn, New York. After getting her start in the music scene of Olympia, Washington in the late 1990s, she released a number of well-received solo albums on K Records, including You Think It's Like This but Really It's Like This (1999) and Advisory Committee (2001). Her 2009 album (a)spera peaked on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart at #46, while her 2011 collaborative album Thao + Mirah peaked at #7. She has released eleven full-length solo and collaborative recordings, numerous EP's and 7' vinyl records, and has contributed tracks to a wide variety of compilations. Mirah has collaborated with artists such as Phil Elvrum of The Microphones, Tune-Yards, Susie Ibarra, Jherek Bischoff and Thao Nguyen. Her newest release, Sundial EP, was released on October 6, 2017 on her imprint Absolute Magnitude Records. Her style encompasses indie pop, acoustic, and experimental pop. According to The Rumpus in 2011, 'Mirah's early records...are DIY mini-masterpieces that express a punk sensibility through broken drum machines, reverb-drenched guitars and ukulele. Her more recent albums...are mature, complex and immaculately-produced.' Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn was born on September 17, 1974, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three children. Her mother is a painter and massage therapist and together with her father ran a small natural foods bakery throughout Mirah's childhood and adolescence. Her father worked delivering Rolling Stone magazine for several years in the late 1970s. Her parents raised the family on macrobiotic foods. Her father was an avid music lover with a large record collection and Mirah developed an early interest in music. As a child, she listened heavily to Motown, 1960s R&B, soul music, and folk music. Mirah's family moved a number of times between 1974 and 1979, including a stint on a hippie commune near Spencer, West Virginia and several years in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse adjacent to the farm owned by her extended family. The family moved to Bala Cynwyd, a suburb of Philadelphia, in 1979. Her mother's family identifies as Protestant and her father is Jewish. Mirah was raised observing Shabbat and identifies as Jewish. Mirah took part in a number of anti-nuclear walks during her middle school and high school years, including a 6-week stretch of the 9-month cross country Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament in 1986 when she was 12. In middle school she developed a love of 1980s pop music and female artists such as Sinead O'Connor and Cyndi Lauper. By the time she got to college, her music collection had expanded to include a diverse range of artists (Huggy Bear, Cat Stevens, The Pretenders, Nina Simone, etc.). After graduating high school early at 16, Mirah spent a year traveling before moving to Olympia, Washington in 1992 to attend the Evergreen State College. She taught herself guitar and wrote her first song as an assignment for class. While in college she worked at a collectively run vegetarian campus café with Kimya Dawson, who later became her label-mate at K Records. She was a member of the short-lived all-female Olympia band The Drivers with Molly Burgdorf and Sarah Reed. For a short stint she sang with a swing band and occasionally contributed vocals to an early incarnation of Old Time Relijun. She was briefly the drummer for The Chosen, a Jewish heavy metal duo. In 1996 she began developing her own musical style, composing lo-fi indie pop with vocals and acoustic guitar. Her early style drew comparisons to Liz Phair, and she soon began performing around Olympia under the one-name moniker Mirah.