Jill Suttie

Jill began playing a nylon string guitar when she was 12 years old, to accompany herself while singing old James Taylor and Joni Mitchell songs at summer camp on the Eel River. She eventually swapped that guitar for a steel string and played in earnest throughout her young adult life. After she met her husband Don Arbor in the fall of 1990, she began playing with him in an acoustic pop/rock band that performed his original tunes and covers at house concerts and small gigs until the band broke up in 2000. Jill then began writing and recording her own songs for the first time, collaborating with a cadre of great San Francisco Bay Area musicians. Her first CD of original tunes, Lucky Girl, was released in 2008.

When not composing or recording music, Jill works as a writer for Greater Good, a publication of the University of California's Greater Good Science Center - greatergood.berkeley.edu. Greater Good reports on ground-breaking research on the science of compassion, altruism, happiness, resilience, and other positive human behavior and emotion. She lives with Don, and their dog, Casey, in the hills of Berkeley, California, where she is happily following her muse and still loves the falls.

See Jill's bio as a journalist.

The Players

A talented group of musicians contributed to Jill's latest album: electric lead guitarist Stef Burns of Huey Lewis and the News, drummer John Mader who’s toured with the Ryan Downe Band and Pee Wee Elllis, bassist Curtis Ohlson who’s played with Pete Escovedo and Booker T, among others, and multi-instrumentalist and recording artist, Barbara Higbie. Don Arbor, Jill’s husband and a recording artist in his own right, also contributed background and harmony vocals, as did Tony Lindsay of Santana and Claytoven Richardson. David K. Matthews contributed keyboards on one track.