For performance bookings,
contact Joe Reilly.
Joe also offers instructional, educational, and inspirational workshops on songwriting, guitar, and environmental justice.
Simply fill out the form below with your email address, subject line and message. Joe will respond as quickly as possible.
Background
Joe Reilly has been a singer, songwriter, and guitarist for over twelve years and has had extensive performance and touring experience, bringing messages of hope and peace in his songs to audiences in the Midwest and across the United States. Both of his parents are singers and guitarists and Joe grew up listening to their classical and liturgical music in his home and church, learning that music can be prayerful, healing, and celebratory. With their help he began to teach himself to play guitar and sing. In addition to self-instruction he has also studied voice and guitar privately and at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. Joe is Italian, Irish, and Native American (Cherokee). His background in the study and performance of many different musical styles, including Native American music, folk, blues, jazz, liturgical, and classical, as well as his academic studies of environmental justice and racism and spiritual roots in Catholicism and Native American religions has led to a writing style that incorporates these diverse influences into a unique and powerful voice.
The Message
The result is a creative and honest voice that calls for a holistic healing of our society for the benefit of future generations. Joe has written, arranged, recorded, and published over 30 songs on three albums and has worked to build a career that supports the sharing of his music with a diversity of listeners through recording, community-based performances, educational and instructional workshops, and tours. It is through the active sharing of his music that he hopes to inspire and empower people to heal their relationships to themselves, each other, and the earth.
Experience
Recordings
Joe has included his music in many different ensembles and
has collaborated with dozens of other artists to create group
recordings and performances. From 1997-2001 Joe was a singer
with a Native American drum group called Treetown and performed
at many Pow-Wows and Native American gatherings around the
Great Lakes region. In 2001 he made his first recording
as a solo artist, arranging a diverse group of musicians and
singers as accompanists with him on nine original songs. In
2001 Joe co-founded the Long Hairz Collective, a trio including
Joe, poet Brian Babb, and emcee William Copeland. Combining
styles of hip-hop, folk, blues, and spoken word in their songs,
the Long Hairz Collective recorded a CD in 2002 and continue
to perform and successfully distribute their CD.
Over the past year Joe has spent much of his time coordinating
the Faith Project, an extremely talented band in Chicago that
includes Joe as its founder, jazz drummer Jon Faro, soul bassist
Alejandro Cornejo, and Haitian master percussionist Camelo
Romelus. Joe is preparing to record his next album, Planting
Gardens, with the Faith Project in June 2005.
New Children's Album - Children of the Earth
 After more than two years of writing songs with and for children, singer songwriter Joe Reilly is ready to release a full-length album of environmental songs for kids of all ages. Titled Children of the Earth, the album includes a chorus of kids’ voices singing with Joe and his guitar on several of the twenty-three fun and educational tunes.
The songs teach environmental science and ecological stewardship while entertaining kids and adults alike. Children’s voices offer brief interludes between songs as they candidly speak about what is important to them in nature and as they teach us how we can better protect our natural environment. The album offers hope for young and future generations in a time when the stability of our earth’s ecosystems and our place in them can feel uncertain.
Offering an interactive musical program called Children of the Earth, Joe helps people of all ages deepen their relationships with themselves, each other, and with their natural environment. Appropriate for preschool through middle school, Joe brings smiles to audiences while teaching ecology and environmental stewardship with creative lyrics and catchy melodies.
 
“I bought this CD [Joe Reilly] for my 8 year old son, who knows (and loves) Joe from Leslie Science Center camps and sing-a-longs. It is wonderful to have music that the whole family can enjoy! The messages are just what we want to be teaching our son: the importance of taking care of the earth, social justice, peace...Thank you Joe!”
~Kathy Linderman, parent
 "Joe invites children into his music. It is music that celebrates the natural world and draws participants in to be a part of it. The children precipitate, evaporate, and condensate through the water cycle; they become a tiny seed that transforms into a life-giving tree. Some of Joe's tunes are artfully woven together with the children's words and ideas. As they move and sing, they learn. Joe's playfulness and humble empathy for all life soon has the children singing about their part in caring for the intricate web of life that connects us all. Joe has a genuine way of communicating with children that holds their attention in the moment but also stays with them to be spontaneously uttered later: ‘We are all related..."
~Jeannine Palms, Blossom Home School, Ann Arbor
Artist's Statement
"I write songs and create music for the benefit of all beings, empowering listeners to become actively engaged in their communities and raising their consciousness with messages of social and environmental justice. Understanding music as an expression of spirit, I write, sing, and perform in order to celebrate life and allow God, my ancestors, and love to sing through me. My music invites listeners to join in this celebration.
I believe that music is a universal healing language that speaks from all that is sacred and mystical, voicing the spirit of God and creation through breath, rhythm, and melody. I have inherited music as a gift from my parents and actively nurture its development through study, practice, performance, and life experience.
Inspired by folk, blues, classical, jazz, hip-hop, Native American, and liturgical music, I strive to create a sound that speaks to the soul of humanity and strengthens those voices inside all people that cry for justice, peace, and health. I want my music to make people smile and feel good when they listen while challenging them to think critically about the world around them.
My tours and performances are organized in ways that bring people together and build community across diverse lines of race, class, gender, age, religion, ability, and music genres. As a Native American, much of my work as a musician directly reaches out to Native communities. I also bring my music to multi-cultural communities, social change activists, elementary, middle, high school and college students, elders, and youth of all backgrounds.
In order to help build vibrant, inclusive communities, I perform in venues as diverse and accessible as community centers, living rooms, coffee shops, community festivals, bars, bookstores, clubs, theatres, conferences, schools, and college campuses. My expertise as an artist, songwriter, and performer continues to evolve and offer a sound that carries instrumental and lyrical messages of hope, joy, justice, compassion, and laughter into the world.
As I continue to challenge myself as an artist and songwriter, I look ahead to an exciting vision of sharing my messages and visions with many new listeners. I humbly offer these songs from my heart to the world like a gentle spring thunder shower, watering seeds of compassion, hope, love, understanding, healing, courage, laughter, freedom, clarity, and reconciliation in the hearts of those who choose to listen. I am grateful for all who have watered those seeds within me and who have encouraged me to take risks and share my gifts in open and honest ways." |
