Product Description Recently featured on NPR s All Things Considered , native Ohioan O Reilly started playing guitar in July 1999, when during her first tour, her guitar player broke his hip while pitching the tent before their first festival show...in front of ten thousand people. Not knowing a thing about playing guitar, she learned three chords in three days and finished her tour by herself. In her first year solo on the acoustic music circuit, she was wowing national audiences in listening rooms from The Bitter End in New York City, to Club Passim in Boston, to the Tractor Tavern in Seattle and Genghis Cohen in Los Angeles. Seattle based Figueroa logged in over 1000 tour dates between 1999 and 2003, greeting fans everywhere with her knock down, drag out vocals and percussive solo acoustic guitar, usually with her two young children in tow. Holly was able to fund the recording of her latest record, "Gifts and Burdens" solely through pre-orders from fans on her extensive mailing list. Holly is poised to embark on a 6 month tour across the country with her children in support of Gifts and Burdens . Review The cover of Gifts And Burdens finds Holly Figueroa resting her head in her hands - the weight of her wedding band dragging her down. This is her divorce album. After 15 years of marriage, Figueroa waxes reflective on a relationship gone south. The overall tone is a bit melancholic and sorrowful as she tries to make sense of what went wrong, wondering if anything could have been done over ("One More Time") . "What You Want" reveals a tortured self-blame that leads her to utter false well-wishes to the man who left her. Though pained, her Americana folk musings never sounded so beautiful. --Eric Shea, Rhapsody.com
