Dara wasn't a musician, when the world changed underneath her; she was a researcher in biology and a software developer in computer science, and had a little art career going on the side. With her glass sculpture in galleries, she was arty, but not yet a musician. She likes to say that she didn't change, the world did - but that's not entirely true, now, is it?

It started with the flutes, or more correctly, with the flutemaking. Dara made them. Not out of metal, but bamboo; she was one of the very few registered martial arts combat flute makers in Cascadia, when that registry existed. But the Seattle folk band Three Good Measures - so called because in early rehearsals that's how many they could get out in a row - needed a flautist, and were meeting to jam in her house with her partner Anna, and said "hey, Dara, you make flutes - you can play, too, right?" It's not as true as you might think, but she learned fast, and started adding backing vocals and percussion in with the flutework. Along the way, she picked up a little choral work, including a gig singing in the chorus for the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Reverend Desmond Tutu, in Seattle.

TGM weren't going to go anywhere, and in fact didn't - the closest to a single before the band broke up was "You Woke Up My Neighbourhood," off the unreleased demo EP "Duck!" - but out of the wreckage of that group came the bands Xander, The Popular Monsters, Twelve Good Measures, and, at the urging of fellow musician Alexander James Adams, Dara's group CRIME and the Forces of Evil.

Dara began playing out by busking, solo, in 2008, after her return from Japan, following that with songwriting and recording. Early demos resulted in gigs from Vancouver south to Redmond, Oregon, and from Seattle east to Boston, Massachusetts, during which time Dara was teaching herself how to build a recording studio and engineer recordings properly.

The first official output from her band came in January 2010, with the release of the four-track studio demo Sketchy Characters. This spawned offers of sponsorship towards a proper full-length, and much of the money for her projects has come from such sponsorship efforts from people who heard that and other demo tracks. In various stages of planning and execution are the instrumental-only Distractions, the piracy-and-revolution folk album Cracksman Betty, and the next major CRIME and the Forces of Evil studio project, Din of Thieves. But the main effort has been on the first full-length studio CD, released in March 2011 as Dick Tracy Must Die. (As Dara says, "That f*cker's gotta go.")

Dara is currently working on putting together shows for the summer and autumn of 2011, as well as writing more new music. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.