In July 2017 we set off on our very first cruise contract for 6 months aboard the Celebrity Eclipse. It was a completely new territory for us in so many ways. In truth it was the first time we’d get compensated for playing as a duo.
Before that, we were living and working in Osaka, Japan as separate performers at Universal Studios Japan. We had some lovely friends that encouraged us to play at a local Osaka bar in order to build our repertoire and gain some confidence as a music duo. Eventually we got up the courage to apply for cruise contracts and amazingly Celebrity took a chance on this brand new duo with a silly name “Gilly & the Girl”.
Fun fact: we had to fib a bit and say that we had at least 150 songs in our repertoire when we probably had only 50. Needless to say, we worked extremely hard and learned several new songs each week while on the ship until we made that number. By our last contract in Fall of 2019, we had over 450 songs.
We ended up renewing our contract over the years and in total we finished 5 contracts ranging from 6 weeks to 6 months. During that time we created dozens of different themed sets, got to collaborate and perform with amazing talent onboard and we developed a full guest artist stage show that we performed dozens of times on different Celebrity ships.
In early March of 2020, things got weird as we all know. We closed on our very first home together, a condo in Central Florida but a week later all of our work was gone. Inevitably, we lost our next contract with Celebrity for that following Summer.
We were scheduled to perform at Margaritaville Resort on St. Patrick’s Day 2020. This was of course cancelled so we decided to just live stream on Facebook that evening. It went so well that we decided to just keep doing livestreams a few times a week. We were able to connect with our true blue fans and even gain new ones throughout the year. We are still incredibly grateful for all of the support we received during such a strange time.
We eventually found ourselves working regularly and often declining opportunities to perform because we were and are still very busy. It’s amazing and we couldn’t be more thankful for it and for all of you!
Many people started asking us when we are going to head back to the ships. We have never been able to give a solid answer. Of course we had a great time working and traveling those few years but we were nomads back then without a home. Now that we have settled into our new place, adopted a cat and are slammed with land gigs we don’t foresee going back to ships in the same way that we used to perform on them.
HOWEVER we got a wild hair in the Summer of 2021 to look into group cruises. It turns out that it’s not too difficult to organize. With the help of my long time friend, Tim Elrod and his travel agency (https://www.travelmation.net) we decided to put together a special Gilly & the Girl Group Cruise.
We realized that this was a huge undertaking but we were very excited to just travel and sing again with people that we have made relationships and connections with these past 8ish years of Gilly & the Girl.
Next month, we depart out of Ft Lauderdale on this crazy 9 day group cruise experiment. Once it’s all said and done we’ll assess and decide if it’s worth another go round so make sure you are following us either here or on our other social media platforms for more info!
