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Tinderbox Founder Alyson Greenfield on Putting Together Her First Festival

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On Sunday, September 26, the Tinderbox Music Festival will be held for the first time. The festival, which will be held at the Brooklyn-based venue Southpaw, is designed to create a new space for women musicians to connect and perform together. 100% of its proceeds will go to non-profit groups dedicated to empowering and educating young women, including Girls Write Now and the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls.

And at this time last year, its founder, Alyson Greenfield, had no idea any of this was going to happen.

An educator, tutor, mentor and musician, Greenfield had recently returned to New York after a draining stretch on the road with Madonna's Sticky and Sweet Tour. It was not as glamorous as that sounds. “I was Madonna's personal trainer's son's tutor," she laughs.

Greenfield had taken the job to see the world, but the grimness, isolation, and stinginess ("They somehow had trouble paying me," she recalls) of being part of Madonna's entourage's entourage prompted her to quit. When she got home to Brooklyn, Greenfield resumed doing what she'd done ever since she was little—writing songs on piano, guitar, and glockenspiel, mostly for herself, often at the spur of the moment.

Before long she decided, like so many other musicians, that she needed a home for these recordings, so she resolved to start a blog. But today, simply having a blog isn't specific enough, and Greenfield's friends told her that it needed a focus. And just hours later that night, she had what she's described as a “Eureka!" moment, and decided to use her blog to try and get onto Lilith Fair's 2010 lineup.

The result, Dear Lilith Fair 2010, launched in November of 2009, and its feed of songs, recalled dreams, pictures and videos did a nice job capturing the variety of music Greenfield likes to make. And, just a few months into its existence, it also started to attract attention.



Greenfield at home. Photo from Dear Lilith Fair 2010.



“I was getting so much feedback," Greenfield recalls, “'I'd love to get on Lilith Fair too, but I'm too small,' or 'I'd really love to be part of this too!' or like, 'It'd be so cool if you made it.'"

Greenfield was so touched by the responses that, before long, her mission started to metamorphose. It certainly got a bit of a nudge when Lilith Fair's organizers canceled most of their planned dates, citing an inability to sell tickets. Suddenly, Greenfield was left with a huge amount of untapped, potential energy, and she decided to harness it.

“There's so many amazing acts here that I know, and I thought, 'None of these people are going to Lilith Fair, but it would be really cool if I could showcase them in some way.'

“I love to organize things, and even though I've never organized something like this before, I thought, “This could be really cool!"

Catching wind of a community's enthusiasm and mounting a full-scale music festival are very different things, however, and conventional wisdom said that Greenfield shouldn't have even tried. Finding sponsors, funds, a venue, artists, and building buzz is a 12 to 18 month job, at least. “I talked to lots of people, and they said stuff like, 'You can't do this in the amount of time you're trying to do it in, that's just not possible,'" Greenfield recalls.

But Greenfield didn't know any better, and off she went, with only a pair of friends to help things along. “That's how I've done everything my entire life," Greenfield says. “I don't have official training or anything, but something propels me to go, and I go and do it."

Tinderbox's existence is the result of many things, including many garden-variety steps any small-scale organizer might take in trying to build something from the ground up. To secure funds required to rent a venue, she launched a Kickstarter campaign and reached out to family and friends to fund it. To gain some attention and exposure, she and some friends wrote pitches to potential media and financial sponsors they thought might respond to Tinderbox's mission.

Greenfield's efforts succeeded where so many others had failed because of the large array of experiences she's had, both in music and in life in general draw upon that helped her make it work. Tinderbox is as much a testament to what a musician can accomplish today as it is to Greenfield's energy, wits, and ability.



Greenfield in press photo mode. Photo by Sheila McManus



Greenfield and her friends experienced a lot of early success—the Kickstarter campaign met its goal, a handful of like-minded sponsors, including Bust and Venus Zine, signed on as media partners—but they also made concerted efforts to be realistic about everything they did.

In looking for a venue, they eschewed cheaper, more festive outdoor options ("What if it rains?"), opting for a space that was slightly smaller than what she needed. “It's better to maybe sell out your first year than to have a lot of empty space," she says.

In an effort to maximize the impact of Tinderbox's proceeds, she chose small, local organizations she was familiar with rather than enormous institutions. “I know that they run off of money being given to them," Greenfield says, citing her previous experience with Girls Write Now, which started out as just one woman in one building.

In an effort to build strong relationships with all of her sponsors, she even turned down eleventh hour offers of assistance from several potential partners.

“We don't just want it to be a situation where we can say, 'Oh we have this name, and this name, and this name!'" she explains. “I want to maintain good relationships with these companies."

And, perhaps most importantly, to ensure that she builds on whatever happens this first year, she plans to present a Tinderbox showcase at SXSW 2011.

“I didn't want this to be a one-off," Greenfield says. “I think that, just based off the buzz and the excitement within the community that we've created, we can make this into more than just one time thing, where we can turn this into a platform for emerging artists and people within the community and charities to get a benefit from. I think it's a good thing. I actually think it's good for many people, and so why not try to sustain it?

“And I knew I'd be going back [to SXSW]," she says, “so why not?"

No matter what happens next Sunday, Greenfield expects Tinderbox to be bigger and better next year. At least, it better be. “I can't ask my friends and family for money again!" she laughs.

But even if Tinderbox 2011 is bigger, it would be tough to make it more diverse. This year's lineup will squeeze Americana and folk (Jenny Owen Youngs, Jennifer Newman), hip hop (Kalae All Day), electronic pop (Hank & Cupcakes), and indie pop that looks forward (Larkin Grimm, Denitia Odigie) and back (Maya Solovéy, Lisa Jaeggi) onto Southpaw's two stages.

“I want this whole day to be a surprise," Greenfield says. “If we'd had more time we could've had a bigger press campaign, and more buzz, and we maybe could've gotten a bigger budget.

“But all in all, I'm glad it came out the way it did, because if we pulled all of this off in the time we did, then maybe people will look at this stuff in a different way."

What a pleasant surprise that would be.

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