That’s how I learned after that, I would watch his hands at church and premeditate his next move.” He would draw six strings and dots where our fingers had to go to make the chords. He drew a makeshift guitar neck on paper. “I started playing guitar when my daddy taught all of us we were between 10 and 12 years old. “Music has always called on me,” says Woo, who was born in Palm Springs and raised in Cathedral City. “They played instruments and fell in love.” Woo sang with them from a young age and set her sights on performing professionally. “Mom and Dad met in a youth group for the church, where they learned to perform,” she shares. Her parents, who emigrated from Mexico in their youth, were harmonizing together in a worship band in Guadalajara long before she and her three siblings existed.

So, we thought, ‘Let’s name it Everything, because there’s a little bit of everything in the album.’ It shows our versatility and the different genres we can touch.” Her favorite track is an up-tempo jam called “Bailar,” which means dance in Spanish on it, Woo plays bass.Ĭhino was just a pup when this songstress, now 36, first ventured out to open mic nights as a solo performer. Woo’s 10-year-old pit bull, Chino, basks in the noontime sun nearby as the Night Owls frontwoman describes the forthcoming album: “There’s some blues in there. She went to Palm Springs High School in the 1970s.” “My mom told me that used to be the hang out spot after school. “It means a lot to me to be performing in such an iconic and historical place,” she says. In January 2022, her band Giselle Woo & The Night Owls will release its first full-length album, Everything they’ll mark the occasion with a performance at the newly resurrected Plaza Theatre in downtown Palm Springs for Oasis Music Festival. She’s reflecting on the decade of determined musical pursuit that led her to this phase in her artistic career. It’s a breezy, early fall afternoon in Morongo Valley, one of those days that compels you to be outdoors because, after so many consecutive summer scorchers, you’ve forgotten how pleasant this arid sandscape can be. “Or smiles,” the desert dweller points out. Rhythm rattles through her bones like a lifeforce and radiates out with such intensity of passion that her performances have been known to move listeners to tears.

All night long chords