To all my listeners since my first album in 1998.  This year, in Sept 2016 I learned my breast cancer treated in 2011 had become metastatic and spread to my liver and spine.  Metastatic cancer is not a curable situation.  At the end of Feb 2017 I learned chemo had stopped working and that no further chemo would have any chance of working for me and I had around 8-12 weeks left to live.  So I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for allowing me to share one of my greatest passions with you all - music.  My music will continue to sell through CD Baby at the links you'll find here and I hope you all continue to enjoy it, sing to it, dance to it, find yourself in it and through it.  Then I know I live in through my music.  

Sincerely, Polly Samuel (aka 'Donna Williams')

HOW I GOT STARTED...

From the age of 3 my head was filled with music that recombined itself into classical compositions.  At 14 I sat at a piano and automatically that music in my head began to pour out from my fingers and I composed my first classical piece of music.  Unable to notate I memorised it.  At 19 I dared to buy my first piano.  I taught myself my own system of notation with letter names, dots and dashes for note lengths and arrows indicating whether notes were going up or down the keyboard.  Finally I taught myself to read music very basically (dyslexia) but enough to roughly notate in a way others might read and play.  This way I composed many classical pieces and began to write songs but had too much Exposure Anxiety to dare let anyone hear them.  

At 22 I met Scott McLeod ('Tim' in Nobody Nowhere), a wonderful human I have known now all the way to the end of my life, and a lovely musician.  I dared to allow him to play my music and dared to sing my songs in private with him.  In time, in my itinerant life lugging around a piano, we shared a house a while and my music poured forth unstoppably.  Many times I lost my piano through homelessness but would always strive to get another.  

Finally, aged 36 I did my first demo CD with a wonderful German blues musician Stefan Kissel ('Julian' in Nobody Nowhere) and long time professional muso, Mick Jones.  A year later I dared my first professionally recorded CD of my songs, named after my first book and titled Nobody Nowhere.  In my 40s I recorded my second, Mutation. 

At 45 I started Donna And The Aspinauts, performed rock musicals I'd written, produced and performed at 12 theaters around Melbourne and recorded the album Broken Biscuit with some wonderful musicians. 

My second keyboard player, Anthony Julian became a duo with me and we continued to perform and finally recorded a children's rock musical, Baloombawop in 2016 and Footsteps of a Nobody as well as two further albums of songs, Weirdos Like Me and Win Win in the midst of my metastatic cancer.  Anthony took on the task of taking my classical music and recording it into an album, Dusk & Dawn with the wonderful Phil Smith.