Stacey Dee
I was born Stacey Anne Dorian – although it took a couple days for my parents to name me as my mom was convinced I would be a boy. I was supposed to be Mark. The woman in the hospital bed next to mom suggested the name Annastacia and with a slight modification the birth certificate was complete!
We lived in Brooklyn, NY – my dad a brilliant but wandering musician and my mom an accidental school teacher – both trying to find themselves. Crazy thing about my heritage is that I come from holocaust survivors on both sides. My father’s family is Armenian and they found refuge in America when millions of Armenians were systematically murdered by the Turkish Government. Years later while attempting to justify his plans for a Jewish holocaust, Adolf Hitler said, “After all, who today remembers the genocide of the Armenians?” Well, Adlof, I do. The connection is in my blood.
My mother’s grandmother, my great-grandmother Katherine Moser whom we all grew up calling “Omi” escaped Nazi Germany with her 3 children – one being my grandmother, Eva. Their father was a German soldier. Though on her mother’s side Eva was Jewish by ancestry, she was raised neither Christian nor Jewish but rather on her mother’s high moral standards and love of nature. In America, she married a young German, Victor Smith, a devout Catholic, and the two embarked on a new vision – “a life on the land, in community, self-sufficient, independent of a destructive society.” They raised their 10 children on a farm in Easton, PA – my mother the 2nd oldest. A story all it's own...
My mom and dad divorced just before my 5th birthday which I celebrated on the road while moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles following my dad. We lived in Tarzana, CA for 3 years – me, my older sister, and my mom. It was in CA that my love of the sun was solidified. Though I was already the youngest in my class, with my birthday falling at the end of summer, I was tested and found to be a “genius” (yikes!) as far as IQ was concerned and skipped 1st grade making me 2 years younger than most of my classmates for the rest of my school years. Who's the genius that decided that was a good idea???!!
Just before my 8th birthday we moved once again – this time following my mom’s brothers, my uncles, to start a new life on our own in Boulder, CO. It was there that I started riding horses – a love that has sustained me through many years and many roads and been a career, a passion, and a necessity in my life.
My sister and I were raised on music. It was always a natural part of life for us – singing, dancing, creating. As a young girl in Boulder though, I began a more intense pursuit of music. I started playing clarinet in the 5th grade and learned quickly, holding the spot of 1st of 2nd chair all the way through 9th grade. (I'm still proud of that, if you can't tell!) I gave up playing the clarinet when I started high school and focused on singing. I was in every choir I could be in and every musical production. I taught myself piano and wrote my first song during my senior year. It was called “Love Like a Rose” and I wrote it for a friend’s wedding.
My sister and I split our time between mom and dad, spending the school year with my mom in Boulder and the summers and every other Christmas with my dad in Florida. My dad remarried when I was 7 and had 4 more children – the first being born when I was 10. Three more sisters and a brother - I was no longer the baby of the family!
It was through my dad and step-mom that I was “saved” at a young age. They told me how Jesus had died for me and that if I believed, He would live in my heart. Cool. I wanted that! It was a simple start of relationship that took many years and turns but developed into a true understanding my Creator and His love for me. It’s this love that drives me and sustains me and out of which much of my music is written.
After graduating high school at 16 years old, I was given a partial scholarship as a voice major at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I studied there for 2 years and finally learned the chord names to the many songs I had by then written by ear on piano. I loved singing but found that the intense classical focus of CU’s program was stressful on my voice. I also realized that I was more drawn to contemporary music and songwriting. So I called it quits as a vocal major and took a break from school for a while.
The summer before I started at CU, I met Patrick Dee. He was intriguing to me – a deep thinker, a talker, a dreamer, a strong personality and leader. We started dating that summer and off and on for the next year. A few months after I turned 18, Pat asked me to marry him and I said yes. We were married in May of 1991, a week after Pat graduated from CU’s business school and a couple months before I turned 19. It still amazes both of us when we look back at how young we were and how much we thought we knew what we were doing!
Three weeks after we were married we moved to Las Cruces, NM for a short 10 months, after which we ended up moving back to Boulder. Back in Boulder I started teaching riding lessons and took a job as a receptionist at a title insurance company to save money for school. I had gotten another partial scholarship as a voice major, this time at Colorado Christian University – a school with a great contemporary music program. I ended up not going. I decided to pursue my horse career instead and gave the money I’d saved to Pat and his older brother so they could invest in building spec homes.
In September of 1992, just after our 1st anniversary and the same week I would’ve started school, I was in a terrible riding accident. A young horse I was training flipped over on me – crushing my right leg from my knee to my ankle. I almost lost my leg – and my life. The next couple years would be spent healing – many surgeries, many hours of rehab, many near death experiences. But it was during this time that I reignited my passion for music. I started playing and writing more than ever. And the culmination of many of those songs is found on my 1st cd – No Words – released in 2001.
Music and horses had often competed for a place in my life but I found that there was room for both – it was just a matter of balance and timing. My horse career grew and I started Grace Farms – a hunter/jumper training, breeding, sales, and show barn. I continued to write and sing, developing more and more connections and relationships with other singers, writers, producers, musicians. We also started having kids during those years – three amazing girls. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I went back to school at American Health Science University and became a Licensed Certified Nutritionist!
In 2005 Pat and I took a huge leap. We were both “successful” in our jobs and working hard toward our future goals, but we had grown apart in many ways. Pat was offered a job in Atlanta at a church – a step he’d dreamed of taking for years but never had. We knew it was time and we both left our businesses, our family, and our friends and moved ourselves and our girls to Atlanta, GA. This brought another shift in balance for me as I put more weight into my music and less and less into horses.
The move from CO to Atlanta, a sort of sink-or-swim effort to save our marriage, brought a lot of change and as I grew as an individual an abundance of music poured out leading to the recording and release of my 2nd cd, Learning to Love, in 2007. The songs on this project chronicle the journey of discovery that my heart was on during those years. I also had started playing guitar and so my writing began to evolve and change around this new expression of music.
I sang and played wherever I found an available mic and started to cover my internet bases as well which is where I was found by an new independent record label. I signed with them shortly after the release of Learning to Love but it only lasted a few months as it became clear to me that we weren’t on the same page.
I was discouraged in a sense but empowered at the same time to take the reins of my own career and make a decision to pursue my music regardless of whether anyone else ever came on board. So I did.
In 2008, we moved to Harrisburg, PA - a different job for Pat but still at a church. For me, I continued writing, singing, playing and sharing my music at every opportunity as well as raising my girls and continuing to discover myself and grow.
One think I've learned (among many things) is life doesn't always take the path you think it will. And sometimes you find yourself in a place you never imagined you'd be. And sometimes, at those bends in the road we're faced with a new reflection of ourselves, our lives, our decisions, and our future.
We can break under the pressure, or bend and grow stronger. I've found God's grace to be bigger than I ever knew and I found it at the place of brokenness. It wasn't until I had exhausted my own efforts, my own striving to "fix" myself and my life, that I found the rest and mercy of truly falling completely into the hands of Grace.
My life does not look like I thought it would.
But my life is not a surprise to God.
He saw each day before it ever happened.
Today, I'm a single mom. I have horses in my life again - living on a beautiful 100 acre farm. I'm singing, writing, and more passionate about it all than I've ever been.
Yes, I'm more broken in many ways, but more beautiful in even more ways!
I hope and pray that my music touches you, encourages you, speaks to you, comforts you, challenges you, blesses you, and gives you great joy.
Thank you for listening!
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