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Let's talk Renaissance Festivals instead of musical influences:
Susan has performed at The Georgia Renaissance Festival, The Carolina Renaissance Festival, The Arizona Renaissance Festival, Scarborough Faire in Texas, and The New Wisconsin Renaissance Fair (with Gregg Csikos). Susan and Gregg are about to go out on the road for another year of festivals, so if you like Susan's sound, go over to Rambling Sailors and check out the two of them together.
Sandra performed at the Georgia Renaissance Festival and the Alabama Shakespeare Renaissance Festival. Although not planning to do Renaissance Festival work again (at least full time) she has written a number of Ren Fest songs that you can check out samples of in the video section of this site.
Sounds Like
Susan performs a song Sandra wrote on her solo album, "Water Meets Sand" - go to the Rambling Sailors page for details.
Barra
For information on what Susan Hickey and Sandra Sparks are doing now in their separate music lives, please visit Rambling Sailors and Sandra Lynn Sparks (the links are in the Top Friends listings below)
This is a page remembering their partnership as An Drasda.
Sandra Sparks and Susan Hickey met in 1991 when Susan first auditioned for the Georgia Renaissance Festival. Two years later, they joined together to form An Drasda, and began performing widely around the Atlanta Georgia area.
The timber of their voices suited each other in a way that one listener once described as "hearing the light on the horizon." After a cameo performance at the 1994 Atlanta Celtic Festival, performing one song, their best known "Bedlam Boys," an audience member proclaimed "I got more out of hearing that one song than any of the [other hour long performance] sets!"
After one of the highlights of their time together, perfoming "The Angry Uvula" for the Foreign Press in 1995, one journalist approached them to ask about the song, which had no real language, and asked what they had sung about. When they explained the language meant nothing, the journalist exclaimed, "I know - you were singing about God!"
Eventually a need to wander pulled Susan north to sail off the coast of Maine, and Sandra reformed An Drasda as a larger group with Moira Nelligan, Michael Robbins, and Tony Early, for a brief and wonderful time. Today, Susan is a regular performer with Gregg Csikos on the Renaissance Festival circuit, and Sandra is a multi-media artist. But fans still remember the days when two women could bring a crowd to a standstill with a single song...
The tracks that are available from the Snocap music store are mainly recordings from a live performance made around 1995; two studio tracks, Bedlam Boys and Amazing Grace, are also available.
Below is a video of Susan performing with Gregg Csikos as Rambling Sailors. They begin performing at the Carolina Renaissance Festival this weekend: go check them out!
Mary Ellen Carter
Here we are in Myspaceland. It's absolutely wonderful to hear the magic of An Drasda again. Thanks for finding me and thanks for posting your beautiful music.
