A Venice Singer Started a Concert Series for Others. It Gave Her a Band.

Ellie Rollins founded Cabin Creek Concerts at Gingerbread Court on Ocean Front Walk and waited until her kids were grown to go pro.

During the Los Angeles fires, Ellie Rollins stood on the Venice Beach Boardwalk and watched them burn in the distance. The song she wrote in those days, "Here Today," is one she counts among her most personal, she told Yo! Venice in a profile published Tuesday.

Rollins is a Bay Area-born singer-songwriter who spent about 20 years in Hawaii and didn't chase music as a career until her children were grown. In Venice she built something for other people first: Cabin Creek Concerts, a series meant to give Westside musicians, local and touring, more places to play. That side project ended up building her own career.

The series is tied to Gingerbread Court at 517 Ocean Front Walk, Yo! Venice reported. Rollins told Culver City News in June that she hosted a show there every Thursday night for three years, with acoustic, folk, Americana and roots acts. Every member of her current band came out of those nights, she said.

The shows have since spread across Los Angeles, according to the Cabin Creek Concerts site. But each summer the series has come back to the sand. This year's boardwalk shows ran on the first Thursday of each month, and on July 2 Rollins shared a 6-to-8 p.m. bill with Ashley E Norton, according to the series' event page. "There's something magical about bringing live music to such an iconic place," she told Yo! Venice.

How she got to Venice at all is its own story. While living in the Bay Area, she went to see Amma, the guru famous for her hugs, and Amma told her that moving to Los Angeles would bring her life into alignment, Rollins told Yo! Venice. Soon after, she was living in Venice. She went back to Hawaii to finish raising her kids, then returned and started the series.

She doesn't treat the late start as a loss. "There's something incredibly beautiful about coming into this chapter of my life with so much experience, perspective, and so many stories to tell," she told Yo! Venice.

Those stories are on a new EP, "Wind in the Trees."

She told Yo! Venice that the song is about remembering what's easy to lose sight of while the city burns: "the extraordinary gift of simply being here today."

Source: yovenice.com, retrieved November 11, 2026. Other sources: culvercitynews.org, cabincreekconcerts.com, cabincreekconcerts.com (2), Ellie Rollins' website.