Windsor musician combines singing with gymnastics
WINDSOR NATIVE BLENDS LOVE OF POP, ROCK AND GYMNASTICS
Although she now lives in Los Angeles, Connecticut will always mean home for Ariel Bellvalaire, who grew up in Windsor and attended Windsor High School. She first became interested in gymnastics, but by age 10 she was already starting her career in music — even if she didn’t know it at the time — taking vocal lessons at Summit Studios in Manchester.
It was there where a rock band jam summer camp put a guitar in her hands and she got to embark on a journey, fulfilling her childhood goal of being like Avril Lavigne, one of her early inspirations.
These days she is exploring layered meanings of being elastic with her debut single, “Elastic.” While this pop-rock tune is catchy, its hardhitting guitar riffs, which pay tribute to guitar masters like Randy Rhoads, Slash and Eddie Van Halen, are in sync with the heartbreak theme of a rocky relationship the singer/guitarist/ gymnast has personally experienced.
Elasticity can also refer to Bellvalaire’s shrednastics, a term she coined to describe her shredding skills on stage while simultaneously performing gymnastic moves.
The “Elastic” video, which went live on streaming platforms Feb. 11, opens with a love triangle story involving Ariel, her guitar and her significant other. His face is unseen, but he is clearly fed up with her playing guitar all the time.
The video intercuts snippets of Bellvalaire in her typically flashy style. These include her in the air above the stage in an aerial ring, upside down as she plays guitar during a concert — one of her signature shrednastics — and her riding on the back of a motorcycle, speeding across a desert while playing her guitar.
“I feel like rocky relationships are the topic of most songs,” she said. “It’s a great way to process everything … just put it into a song, but for ‘Elastic’ specifically it was about a backand-forth relationship where I never really knew where I stood.
“It was on, it was off, or I would pull away just to be pulled back.”
Being interviewed the day the video dropped, she was quite excited and noted it was quite a journey to get here.
“It has been an ongoing battle. I actually started doing music at 10 years old in Connecticut. I became in love with Avril Lavigne and basically wanted to be her. When I saw her performing, I was just like, ‘OK, that’s my job. It’s going to happen. I got this,’” she said.
She sang the praises of Summit’s rock band jam camp, which evolved into a year-round program, for kickstarting her career.
“I started playing guitar and I loved it. My first experience on stage, I had to sing and play guitar in a band,”she said. “That just fueled my fire and made me work even harder.
“And then I started getting really into rock music, learning all these guitar solos. I would bring them in to the band, and the first time we had a show live and I played these solos, the audience just freaked out that there was this little girl playing the solos.”
She soon kicked things into high gear, starting a YouTube channel that today has 10,000 subscribers, posting on social media and landing gigs in New York City. She was soon signed to a glam band and worked with several producers before joining L.A.’s music scene.
“It’s just been pretty much constantly putting myself out there and exploring every opportunity I could get,” she said, noting she now has an album’s worth of original material. The plan will be to release them as singles, and the next one will likely drop this spring.
Talking about her strong connection to the guitar, she says it has been a constant since coming into her life.
“It’s been the one thing I have been drawn to that has never talked back to me. It’s never broken my heart … It’s just been my No. 1 love,” she said. “I feel like a lot of relationships have ended because they were either jealous of my guitar getting more attention than them or due to the fact that I’m getting gigs as a female guitarist.”
Laughingly referring to her main guitar as her wife, the favorite of her nine Fenders is her gold Fender Stratocaster with double humbuckers that has traveled the world with her. “We have had so many experiences together. I’ve shared more stage time with her than anyone else,” she said.
Debuting her shrednastics on the ABC television show “The Gong Show” a few years ago, she said this marriage of her twin passions came to be by accident. Ever the showman, she loves to challenge herself and give audiences a thrill during her shows.
“When I was on stage, the audience would always go wild, and whenever they went wild I would do something flashy like play a crazy rift and spin backwards a little bit. And they would always just go crazy, so I was like, ‘All right, what can I do that’s even crazier?’”
Adding full splits and aerial work soon followed. “I am not one for sitting still. They call me the Energizer bunny with a guitar. I am all about the shock value and over-the-top tricks. It’s just fun for me, finding new ways to incorporate gymnastics, nature and guitar — all of my loves.”