At 19 years old, Hannah Taylor jumped in a car with $400 in her pocket and chased a dream.
The native of the small town of Courtland, New York was an artist at heart and thought Philadelphia was the place where she could nurture her aspirations.
“It’s really rural so they don’t know what to do with weirdos like me,” Taylor said with a laugh. “When I was 19, I was like I gotta go to a city.”
First she studied abroad for a year in Dingle, Ireland, living in a hostel and painting landscapes of the beautiful seaside mountains of the country’s most western peninsula.
“When I came back that summer, my teacher said, ‘You gotta get to an art school in a city and pursue this,’ ” Taylor said. “I made a portfolio and moved down here with $400 to my name and knew exactly one person and I never looked back. I’ve been here for 20 years now and I feel really awesome about all the things happening.”
Upon her arrival, Taylor lived at 8th and Porter streets before settling at 5th and Tasker in 2014 and studied at the University of the Arts. She went on to paint numerous murals around South Philly including spots like Newbold Exchange, Rebel & Wolf Cafe, Bridget Foy’s and For Pete’s Sake. But Taylor’s true passion was music. And Philadelphia became the central gathering point for a band she would eventually help create in 2019 called The Flying Vees.
Created by Caitlin Ramsey who plays the keyboard, the group includes Taylor, Shannon Vasile and Brechyn Chace, who supply a beautiful three-part harmony that can either soothe you with a cappella harmonies or rock you to the bone with powerful and emotional folk-style anthems that bravely target powerful people.
The group came together when Ramsey, a fan of bluegrass festivals, conjured the idea of blending the keyboard with some basic percussion and three powerful voices.
“I was like what would happen if we all got together for a weekend and wrote songs?” Ramsey said. “What’s the worst that could happen? We would just have fun. But we ended up making three songs right away.”
The Flying Vees had captured lightning in a bottle, but continuing down that road had its challenges. Ramsey and Chace live in Chambersburg, a small Central Pennsylvania town about three hours from Philadelphia. Vasile lives in Collingswood, New Jersey.
“It’s a long-distance relationship but we all have to make the effort and the sacrifices,” Ramsey said. “We have to drive a lot of long distances and host each other, which we really love doing.”
One of those busy weekends vaulted the group to local stardom.
The Flying Vees entered WXPN 88.5’s 24-Hour Song Challenge on June 7, which gives artists exactly 24 hours to create a song and record a video based on a secret prompt provided by the station. At noon on July 6, the prompt of “freedom” was given and the Vees — who happened to be together playing a strip of gigs that weekend — went to work quickly.
“Shannon wrote it,” said Taylor, who also plays guitar. “She has been doing this writing exercise where she writes a poem a day since January. So she was sort of training for it. And we were all together, which is also kind of rare because two of the girls live three-and-a-half hours away.
“We had a rehearsal for the gig we were playing. She left and went to the bathroom and like 10 minutes later she had the bones of the song and we refined it in between rehearsing and driving to this gig. I came up with a melody and we fine tuned that all before we got to this gig. Then we flushed it out more. It was all serendipitous.”
Their creation, “Workmans Song #1” was selected by the station as a finalist and fans and listeners voted it the winner of the challenge.
The Flying Vees won $5,000, inclusion on WXPN’s Philly Anthems vinyl album, 10 hours at MilkBoy Recording Studio, a $500 gift card to Russo Music, inclusion in songwriting workshops and a year WXPN Program Partner Membership.
“I felt like my soul left my body,” said Vasile, who is an elementary school teacher in Riverton. “You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was so shocked because I’m not the type of person who is used to winning stuff. I’m used to taking the long way around. It was an amazing moment. It was just so gratifying and validating of what we have been working toward all this time.”
By winning the contest, The Flying Vees also earned a spot to open the second day of the three-day XPoNential Music Festival presented by Subaru at Wiggins Park in Camden in September.
Despite beginning their set just minutes after the gates officially opened, the group received strong support and crowds gathered in close as the Vees performed on the big stage. There were sing-alongs and loud ovations when the group played a powerful unreleased song about human trafficking.
“It’s so cool that people are aware and know that it’s a huge issue,” Chase said. “It’s important to sing about it and talk about it and not let people get away with it. It’s such an important song that Shannon wrote.”
Just like the weekend of the song challenge, the Flying Vees packed their schedule around XPoNential Fest. Just two days prior, they were playing a small gig in Terminal C of the Philadelphia International Airport. Forty-eight hours later they were the focus of a major music festival and received enormous applause.
“It’s honestly a dream come true,” Taylor said. “Everyone treated us so nicely and everything is a well-oiled machine here with production both on stage and off stage. It feels great because we’ve been busting our asses a lot over the last six years. It feels really cool to see it be recognized.”
Twenty years and $400 later, Taylor’s return on investment certainly paid off.
“This is all of our collective projects and this one just feels so raw and personal,” she said. “It feels extra special that we are here and had such an awesome response. I think we just needed to be in front of the right crowd and everything speaks for itself.” ••
