super awesome blog post

Miss Erma is The Lost Church’s resident little sister. At the theater, she’s in the musicals and performs solo with her guitar or with a variety of instruments in all kinds of combos – she even bartends. “The Lost Church is my home and my family,” Miss Erma said. “It’s a safe and warm place to share your art and have people really listening to the music you make because of the way Brett and Lizzie set it up.”

"She has a voice that at once lilts and haunts her evocative, 
​playful original songs and covered ditties; a style of playing strings that swings and falls, 
turning her unwittingly into a corps dansant."

Growing up in Satellite Beach, Florida, Miss Erma started playing piano at six, like her older sister, but it was starting the violin at ten that really hooked her. “It’s a social instrument you can play with other people – that’s what I like about it.” She headed to college with her violin, a music ed major at Florida State University. “I’m a highly sensitive person and music is a way to express that. In college, I fell in love with it and learned to respect music and learned to work hard for it. It became a goal. I liked the way playing music made me feel.”  There, Erma also started writing music, playing more guitar and “doing the singer-songwriter thing.”
 
In 2010, Miss Erma left Miami, where she was teaching music, for San Francisco. She dove head first into the scene, melding her classical training with modern muses, happy to be playing different styles of music with a slew of different people. It was when playing violin with Roger Rocha & the Goldenhearts that she was first introduced to The Lost Church. “I thought, ‘Wow! I have never been to a place like this before.’ Then I booked a Miss Erma show there, back when I had a full band, and I’ve been deeply intertwined with The Lost Church and the Clines ever since.” She also plays there with her classical violin outlet Manzanita Quartet and with Seth Lael as the duet Seth & Erma, which is heading to SXSW in March.

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