Meet Ellie Brigida

We were lucky to catch up with Ellie Brigida recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ellie, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

Ever since I was young, I have loved to sing. As I got older, I realized that my singing brought joy to the other people around me as well. I love the way that singing the right song can make you cry, dance, laugh or smile. I’ve known my purpose was to create music from a. young age, but as I grew up, I realized that I loved the community that music created, either between members in a band or the audience.
Community building has always been at the center of my life. I found community through music and I enjoyed all of the friendships that I made along the way. From college a cappella to choir to musicals, the friends that I made in those spaces became my family.
When I was in college, I came out as a lesbian and I made an entirely new family. I felt like I could finally be my authentic self and I was accepted for every part of that.
My purpose in life is to build community around music, women and the LGBTQ+ community. They’ve both been the biggest driving forces of my life. When I started the Femmes, all of the those communities came together. With the Femmes, I was bringing women and nonbinary musicians together in a safe space where they could feel nurtured and celebrated. The audience gets to build community with each other at our shows. And we get to build meaningful connections with our audience as well. It feels like everything in my life has led to this.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I’m the founder of the Femmes, Boston’s only women and nonbinary party band. The Femmes are an all-woman and non-binary wedding band specializing in songs by female and non-binary artists. When you’re at a Femmes show, you’re at a high energy concert experience. Epic sing alongs, expertly crafted harmonies, and musicians who absolutely LOVE to interact with the audience, the Femmes are Boston’s go-to women’s party band! We’ve been featured on CBS News and the Boston Globe for bringing marginalized voices in a heteronormative space.

I’m also the co-host of Lez Hang Out, Queerty nominated lesbian podcast that has been running since 2017.
I’ve produced and starred in two original musicals from Dollar Bean Productions, focusing on musicals by and for the LGBTQ+ community with guaranteed happy endings.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I think the three skills that were most impactful for me in my journey were creativity, self-discipline and passion. From the beginning of my journey as an entrepreneur, I knew that I couldn’t do anything else with my life. My passion for music and creating a life that was uniquely different was so strong that there was no other option for me. I had to become self-disciplined to keep driving towards my passion. At every step of the way there was another problem that needed to be solved and I couldn’t have done it or continued to do it without my creativity. I think that if you’re early in your journey and need to develop self-discipline, you need to get very clear on what your passion is. For me, I write it down in a journal and visualize the life that I want. Once I’ve done that, I write down everything that I need to do to get there and focus on all of the steps along the way.

Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?

I think it’s better to go all in on our strengths instead of trying to be more well rounded because you can’t realistically do every single thing on your own. Delegating is a gigantic strength for building a business and I wish that I had worked on delegating earlier. I think you should learn your strengths and really lean into them. And find people who complement you and have strengths where you aren’t as strong. Those people should build your team so that as a unit you have all of those strengths. And you should learn about things that other people are doing so you have a general understanding of them.
For example, I am a creative dreamer and networker. I spend most of my time dreaming about how to expand my business and different ways that we can do that and who we can do that with. My job is to create the vision and execute where I can. I am not very strong with organization and numbers. So I have another member of the band who works on those things for me. We have meetings where we go over the numbers and our financial goals, so I’m hands on with our finances, but I’m not bogged down by the day to day spreadsheets so I can help grow the business in other ways.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thefemmesband.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/thefemmesband
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/thefemmesband

Image Credits

Ginette Slaughter, Kiki Katsumata-Smith