Inside Look: Miranda Dabel

Age: 28
Number of Years at Camp: 2
Hometown: Idaho Falls, Idaho

As a student coming to the Pendleton Rock and Roll camp this year, you are greeted by a group of diverse counselors. With all the differences, each is brought to the Pendleton Center for the Arts for the same reason: To help inspire kids to get into music. If Rock Camp somehow turned into a Rock and Roll High School, Maranda would easily end up with the yearbook superlative of “Coolest/Best Hair”. Her red orange pixie cut stands out all on its own.

When not helping out with the camp, Maranda can be found slinging coffee or working in her garden—she says she has around twenty different kinds of vegetables. She listed bass guitar, guitar, mandolin, xylophone and kazoo—thrown in because she found it funny—as instruments she liked to play. Of course, if she’s able to play instruments, she must have a band, right? Actually, she has a couple: Heroes & Villains and Advisory.

Throughout a person’s musical career, many artists have a particular show or moment in music that stands out for them. I asked Maranda what hers was, and she had no problem recalling a show she had played in her home city of Portland. She had been playing with her band Heroes & Villains, and even though she explained her feeling of being on top of the world with words, the look on her face clearly explained it all. The happiness she had at that moment was not only her own, she said, but it was shared with the rest of the band and the crowd. “The audience was so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop,” Maranda explained, thinking back.

It’s easy to see that with Maranda, music isn’t just simply something she listens to in the car to fill in awkward silences, it’s a passion. From camps to concerts, she’s in it for the love and has come to rock camp to help share that same passion with the kids. She says she just wants to help her students “find love in music.”

-Paige Snively