DENISE LA GRASSA

As Denise La Grassa moves into the mixing and mastering stages of her 9-song album Sundown Rising due out in early summer, it’s easy now to look back on how the poem songs she wrote as a wee child foreshadowed a late-blooming full-time music career. Those songs were just a warm-up for the spunky 5-year-old, as she then went door-to-door in her suburban Chicago neighborhood offering to sing and sell them to neighbors – right on their doorstep - for 25 cents apiece. Artist? Check. Entrepreneur? Check.

Fast forward a few years and now living in the small Wisconsin town of Baraboo, the audacious now 9th grader accepted a challenge from the town’s legendary Circus World Museum to try breaking the world record for muscle grinds on the trapeze. She succeeded, securing for a brief time an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.

In her early 20s, Denise landed in Chicago, where she stumbled upon the comedy and improv enterprise The Second City and quickly worked her way into the touring company, honing her chops nightly at venues across the country. She also worked her way into Chicago’s vibrant music scene, performing with her band for decades at venues across the city.

A few decades on, Denise La Grassa is more creative than ever, and just as audacious. As she prepares to release Sundown Rising, the bluesy follow-up to her 2023 album The Flame, La Grassa shows no signs of slackening from her 2022 re-entry into full-time songwriting and performance. That pivot followed the closing of the 157-year-old private college where she led and revitalized the music program, a move she calls her ‘North of 40’ journey. As in, ‘can a woman … say north of 40 … follow her dream of returning to Europe to perform with her new band and new, bluesy sound?’

The Flame’s 10 songs of rootsy, rockin’, blues garnered airplay from nearly 70 radio stations nationwide - a major feat for a new, independent artist—and secured a Top-25 spot on the Roots Music Report Contemporary Blues chart. The single 'Better Day’s Coming' soared to the Top-on the singles chart, surpassing La Grassa's modest expectations.

Sundown Rising moves La Grassa’s further into what she calls “my take on the blues.” It’s another way of saying the gumbo of blues, roots, rock, and soul inspirations is obvious in her songwriting. But one can also hear her jazz background augmenting a sound unlike anything else in the roots-rock universe today. That vibe and her powerful voice have already captured the attention of Chicagoans at venues including Epiphany Center for the Arts, Hard Rock Café, Montrose Saloon, and Phyllis’ Musical Inn, among others, as well as blues haunts in Milwaukee and downstate Illinois. They too have become believers in this unlikely ‘North of 40’ journey.