We’ve never had the opportunity (yet) of meeting Lindsey Stirling, but we’ve admired her for years on YouTube and marvel at the track she took to develop and polish her talent. Do YOU know Lindsey Stirling? Well, if you do or you don’t, you have to watch her video below to just be entertained.
Lindsey Stirling had a great dad who encouraged her in music with his classical music albums and by studying the violin at the age of five. She took violin lessons for twelve years. In the process of learning and mastering the violin, she decided to learn how to dance—while still playing the violin. And she learned and trained herself in a most unconventional way: On YouTube. One report said “She studied footwork, practiced moves and techniques, and even taught herself to Moonwalk, becoming the world’s first unofficial YouTube-trained dancer.” Her YouTube channel now has 13.5 million subscribers.
Lindsey has been named in Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 in Music: The Class of 2015. She was a quarter-finalist in America’s Got Talent season five in 2010 and achieved a No. 2 position on the Billboard 200 for her second album Shatter Me in 2014.
In an interview on WHRB Radio 95.3 from Harvard Radio Broadcasting, she said: “I think I’ve always loved dance, but I was never a dancer. I was made to choose when I was a kid: I wanted dance lessons, and I wanted to play the violin, but my parents couldn’t afford both. I had never danced at all until I started to try to pair it with the violin. I was starting to get into different kinds of music, and it just felt strange to be standing there while playing rock or electronic. I started to add movement, and then that turned into teaching myself how to pirouette, how far can I do a backbend. I was experimenting and realizing how much I could do while playing the violin.
“Dancing and playing violin must take lots of practice, so I was wondering how you make the most of your time. There’s only 24 hours in the day, but you have to work in both disciplines!” (https://www.whrb.org/archive/lindsey-stirling-violin April 30, 2021)
When asked in that same interview what her hope was at the larger impact of her songs and videos, she said: “My focus has always been to make people feel empowered, make them feel like they can do great things. That’s always the goal after every show. I hope that, of course, everybody’s well entertained, but I really hope that, secondly, they leave thinking, ‘I want to get after it!’ I really think about that and try to say things that I would want to hear if I was sitting in the audience.”
Take the four minutes here to be dazzled by this most amazing performer, Lindsey Stirling, doing a seasonal favorite (like you’ve never heard or seen before) What Child is This. This video has had 17 million views.
