Anita Kruse worked as a soloist and as an accompanist for some time before beginning to write her own songs during her final year of graduate study. Since then, Anita has performed her original material coast-to-coast, in such diverse cities as New York, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, and Houston.
Anita's songwriting began as a manifestation of music that originated in her dreams as a graduate student. Her writing was encouraged by her professors, who suggested she let her songs emerge without criticism, and that she allow herself time and space to grow.
Today, Anita has recorded two self-produced CDs, All We Have is Now and Light, and is currently releasing a third, Creation Flight, produced by Robbie Parrish, who perceived this collection as Anita's personal journey toward discovering her ancestry through the "mother-line." Anita interprets Creation Flight as a type of genealogical "bridge," explaining that songs like "Angel of My Thunder" and "Early Days of You" treat the gap in her own family's maternal bloodline caused by the untimely death of her mother's mother long before Anita's birth.Significantly, Anita's grandmother (whom she never knew, but for whom she's named) was also a singer and a songwriter, yet, ironically, Anita remained unaware of this musical heritage until after she began composing her own songs. Anita says she wrote "Angel of My Thunder" about "picking up where my grandmother left off" and "Early Days of You" about "healing the break," adding, "the bridge is the bloodline and exists whether you're alive or not. We are living ancestors--those who aren't living work through the blood."
Through Creation Flight and through her live performances Anita extends her family's musical line, reaching audiences with songs written as gifts. But perhaps her broadest expansion of this personal tradition, to date, has been through her work as an instructor of piano and songwriting and through her three years at Houston's Poe Elementary School, where she facilitated children's creative endeavors, organizing annual musical productions of their original songs and stories.
