jennifer moran
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Some young musicians spend years developing their passion, but for 14-year-old bass guitar virtuoso Mena Burnside it was like tossing a match into kerosene. Just eleven at the time, and with little previous musical training, this talented Nashville stand-out recalls the exact moment she saw the path of her future light up like Atlanta in Gone With the Wind.
It was the summer of 2008, in a suburb just south of Nashville. Mena was helping to wrap up a summer session at Franklin’s acclaimed Kids On Stage arts program, and she had been assigned the job of moving several instruments. “I picked up this big bass guitar and thought, Hmmm... I wonder what this sounds like. I strummed a few strings and all at once this feeling went through me!” Now seated in her family’s comfortable suburban home, she shivers at the memory, young eyes bright behind over-sized, dark-framed glasses. “It was like, Oh! So THIS is going to be my instrument. THIS is how I’m going to spend my life!” Pretty strong stuff coming from an eleven-year-old girl - not to mention, one who had fallen in love with an instrument still largely lorded over by males.
But little Mena Burnside had clearly hit some kind of vein. Just three years later, people in Nashville’s seen-it-all music industry are beginning to notice the thin, fresh-faced girl with the wild head of waist-length curls who’s eclectic style and raw power on bass is what some call nothing short of astonishing. From winning her first company endorsement this last summer (and a three thousand dollar bass guitar to go with it), to being chosen from a national field of thousands as a spokesperson in the latest Got Milk campaign this April, Mena’s star is clearly on the rise. (Look for the New York photo layout she recently shot, along with the other winners, in this fall’s Seventeen Magazine.)
“She has a gift,” says Ansir Music owner Jody Michael, who’s handmade, exotic wood bass guitars caught Mena’s attention one fateful day last summer. “I’ve heard thousands of people play my basses. What it comes down to, is the dynamics someone puts into the instrument. With Mina, every note she plays has purpose. Every note is pure. She plays from the soul.”
In fact, at last summer’s NAMM in Nashville, the legendary industry trade show that draws a veritable Who’s Who of musicians, Michael recalls how her jaw-dropping talent led him to do the unthinkable. “This little girl walks up and asks if she can play one of my bass guitars,” he says. “I had just had Victor Wooten, one of the world’s greatest bass players, playing it and I figured, what the heck? Next thing I know there’s a crowd gathering around her and I just can’t believe what I’m hearing. I got out my video camera and just started shooting. Then I took it back to the plant in Ohio to show everyone.”
The story doesn’t end there. A month later he returned to Nashville to present her with the handmade, one-of-kind instrument. Nice move - except that this particular bass was one of Michael’s favorites. He says now that he had no intention of ever selling, much less giving it away. Until Mena, that is. “There’s a connection a musician gets to an instrument,” he says. “Spiritual, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t think of it as mine, anymore. I gave it to its rightful owner.” She is now the company’s first, and only, endorsee.
These days, Mena can be heard playing the treasured bass with her 16-year-old brother, Bennett, at local venues like the Frist Cafe. She also plays with a young group of friends in a band called “I’ll Protect the Ladies”, who last summer stole first place in Spring Hill’s Poolapalooza Battle of the Bands. Only weeks earlier, she had been a last-minute sub with another young band, “The Red Z’s”, and helped the group win Williamson County’s Battle of the Bands.
Then just days after this interview, Mena was notified that the very-original video she submitted for a national Got Milk spokesperson contest had been chosen by a panel as one of 27 finalists - the only one from Tennessee. The final nine will be chosen by an online public vote that closes April 21. In the video, she cleverly extols the virtues of drinking milk, while also playing her bass to the beat of a spoon against the side of a glass of the white stuff. Between her angelic features, confident camera presence, and kick-ass playing, one would hope she’d be a shoe-in as a role model for young women.
But sitting at home now, the ever-present bass across her lap, Mena still looks a little surprised at all the fuss. She’s just a girl who wants to play her bass. She asks a little shyly if she can play a new number she’s working on for an upcoming gig with her brother. “It’s just something I put together from several other pieces that I liked,” she says.
Then, like a flash of lightening, the room lights up with her talent and you suddenly get why people are talking about this girl. The notes tumble out in an astonishing array of sounds, some deep and long with moody jazz undertones, other short and choppy as her hand slaps the strings, her fingers working their way up and down the neck with astonishing speed and adeptness. No careful plucking here - her hands never stop, sliding up and down the neck, her fingers in a blurry dance across the frets that appears effortless, yet is anything but. She never looks up for even a moment until the last note fades away in the failing evening light. When she finally glances up, it’s as though she suddenly remembered her guests, and appears slightly startled to see us.
Influenced deeply by her musician father’s love of classic rock from the sixties and seventies, she says she goes to her friends’ houses these days and winces at some of their music. “I’m so fortunate that I’ve had such great influences. I grew up listening to blues, Billy Joel, Elton John, the Beatles. My ultimate dream is to play with Jeff Beck or Paul McCartney. Or Victor Wooten.”
At least one of those legends, Victor Wooten, lives here in Nashville, and it’s hard not to imagine that their paths will eventually cross. Maybe even onstage.
Franklin musician Gene Cotton, a founding member of the Kids On Stage summer program where Mina first discovered the bass, is watching from the couch. A huge grin lights his face. “I’ve seen thousands of kids come through our program,” he says. “From Ke$ha and Miley Cyrus, to several members of Paramore. But I have never seen a natural talent on the bass like Mena at her age. She has that mystery that sets her apart from the rest; this things that says, This is who I am. This is who I’m meant to be.’“
Still wrapped around the gleaming bass, Mena doesn’t even blush. That’s because she isn’t listening to a word Cotton, or anyone else is saying about her. Head down, fingers caressing the strings, she’s lost in the music, struggling to perfectly nail the notes of her bright future.
Profile:
MENA BURNSIDE, BASS PLAYER
for Nashville Arts Magazine, August, 2011
