In 2007, Lilli Worona stood by a campfire circle with fiddle in hand waiting to accompany a tune. Worona, who had recently drove 3,000 miles west from Hobart & Williams Smith Colleges in New York to work at a wilderness therapy organization in Redmond, put aside her anxiety and slowly waded into the song. “I fell in love with folk and country music and learned how to improvise in those song circles around the campfire,” says a reminiscent Worona. Worona grew up studying classical violin and sang in the kids’ choir at her local synagogue in Natick, Massachusetts, but hadn’t touched her instrument in almost a decade. By high school, she had strayed from her musical path towards the athletic pursuits of swimming and track. Within a few years after moving to Bend, Worona was performing with local bands, including a tour of Colorado with roots rockers Broken Down Guitars, where she got her first taste of the musician’s lifestyle while playing to a packed bar during an epic Crested Butte snowstorm. Since 2017, she has been singing and playing fiddle in the local country outfit Dry Canyon Stampede. When not playing for crowds of enthusiastic country line dancers or sitting in with various other local bands, Worona is shaping the minds of Central Oregon’s youth as a science teacher at Redmond’s Elton Gregory Middle School. Nights filled with songs and fiddle solos are replaced by days of photosynthesis and natural selection. “Teaching is always my first priority,” explains Worona. “Learning how to have a balance between my teaching life and my musician life has been challenging.” Worona takes every opportunity she can to mix music with teaching. As a Madras High School teacher, her band performed in the end of the year concert and she invited Bend’s Poet Laureate Jason Graham to teach spoken word. At her current school, Worona started an after school music club and she can’t wait to be able to start it back up once she is able to safely do so.“I miss their energy so much and I am reminded every day why I chose this profession in the first place,” says Worona. When not playing music or teaching, Worona can be found tending to her garden or backpacking with her husband in the Three Sisters Wilderness. She fell in love with backpacking during her college trip abroad in New Zealand and since relocating west has explored the forests from Olympic National Park to Peru.
Turning Journaling into Songwriting
As performances were canceled and creativity in the classroom turned to computer-based lesson plans last spring, Worona began channeling her energy towards songwriting. She wrote five new songs in about six months, taking cues from her passion for journaling, which she has done since college. Invigorated by her creative output, Worona set her sights on the goal of recording an album of original material called “Between The Lines.” The pop/folk title track details the correlation between keeping her current thoughts neatly confined within the lines of a new journal as opposed to the messy ideas filling her past journals without lines.
“I wrote to feel edgy, to shout, to feel small. I wrote so I’d remember someday what it was like to chase boys, make progress and choices with lots of mistakes along the way”
Once Worona announced her new project, friends and bandmates—Jim Goodwin, Stacie Lynn Johnson, Mike Biggers, Shireen Amini, Benji Nagel, and Kurt Silva—jumped at the chance to contribute to the album being recorded at Keith Banning’s Grange Recorders in Sisters. In addition, Biggers helped with her songwriting and Amini assisted with Worona’s Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. Even her brother will helped with the album cover. "I simply wanted to create beautiful music, share it with others, and hopefully spark some joy and happiness for those who connect with it,” explains Worona.