HalleyAnna

Like her older sister and brother, Jenni and Sterling, HalleyAnna Finlay grew up surrounded by songwriters and was pretty much destined from birth to follow a musical path in life. But unlike her siblings, her earliest childhood memories were not shaped inside the walls of Cheatham Street Warehouse. HalleyAnna was born in October 1986, and her parents, Kent and Diana, sold the music venue soon after in ’88. By the time the Finlays picked up where they left off in the Cheatham business at the very end of the ’90s, HalleyAnna was already creeping up on her teens.

Although HalleyAnna missed out on the experience of sleeping on pool tables, her wonder years were still rich with song. While her mother was working at a San Marcos newspaper, her dad would juggle babysitting duties with songwriting sessions. Not that she minded; she recalls with fondness an afternoon playing in the park while her dad and Slaid Cleaves sat nearby writing “Don’t Tell Me,” which Cleaves recorded on his 1997 album, No Angel Knows. She also remembers the day Terri Hendrix visited her second-grade class at DeZavala Elementary, and feeling quite tickled with herself that she recognized one of the songs Hendrix played, “I Was a Seed,” as an Al Barlow original. “I was like, ‘I know the guy who wrote this song!’”

Along with all the songwriters in her life, HalleyAnna also grew up singing and playing guitar every Sunday at San Marcos’ First United Methodist Church. “That all kind of made music and songwriting something in my life that I just couldn’t live without,” says HalleyAnna, who started playing guitar at 11 (following a crack at fiddle) and later played saxophone in her high school jazz band. “It was habitual.” Consequently, by the time she started participating at Cheatham’s songwriters nights and opening shows there for artists like Monte Montgomery, Sisters Morales, and Hendrix at the ripe-old-age of 13, fear-of-performing-in-public wasn’t much of an obstacle.