Cosy Sheridan with TR Ritchie

Artist Information

Biography

Cosy Sheridan and TR Ritchie have between them won most of the major songwriting contests in the U.S., among them the Kerrville Folk Festival, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, The Sisters Folk Festival, The Napa Valley Folk Festival, The Silverton Folk Festival and the Snowbird Mountain Festival in Utah.
Often traveling together but also performing as solo artists, for the past 20 years they have toured the U.S., singing their songs in coffeehouses and concert halls, house concerts and festivals.
Sheridan has been called "one of the era's finest and most thoughtful singer-songwriters.” A storyteller as well as a songwriter; she weaves children’s fables into metaphors of modern adulthood: The Little Engine That Could talks with Ferdinand The Bull. Her modern renditions of mythology (we meet Hades the biker) have won her fans and praise from the press. The Cornell Folksong Society wrote: “Sheridan is frank, feisty, sublimely and devilishly funny. She fuses myth with modern culture; Persephone with Botox.”
She first appeared on the folk scene in 1992 when she won the songwriting contests at the Kerrville Folk Festival and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and released her critically acclaimed CD Quietly Led on Waterbug Records. Folk Music Quarterly wrote: “When she’s accepting her Grammy, we can say we knew her when.”
Since then she’s released 5 more CDs, taught songwriting at workshops and camps across the country and written a one-woman-show entitled The Pomegranate Seed – An Exploration of Appetite, Body-Image and Myth in Modern Culture.

Ritchie, who learned his musical chops as a street singer in Seattle’s Pike Street Market in the early 80’s, is a master of understated yet powerful imagery in his songs. Dubbed a “classic folk troubadour” by Performing Songwriter magazine, Ritchie’s roots-influenced music has a timeless appeal. This past July he was invited to accompany Alexandra Cousteau and her Blue Legacy crew of photographers and writers on a trip though Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River to add musical perspective to the National-Geographic-sponsored expedition. The crew filmed him singing “Let This Mighty River Roll,” his song for Glen Canyon.
Sheridan and Ritchie met at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1992, and moved to Moab, Utah in 1994. In 2008 they co-founded the Moab Folk Camp, a folk and acoustic camp that takes place each November in conjunction with the Moab Folk Festival.

Instrumentation

Cosy Sheridan - guitar, vocals
TR Ritchie - bass, vocals

Discography

Eros - Windriver/FolkEra 2008
Live At CedarHouse, Waterbug Records - 2006
The Pomegranate Seed, CMS Records - 2004
Botox Tango, CMS Records - 2004
Anthymn, WindRiver/FolkEra Records - 2000
Grand Design, WindRiver/FolkEra Records -1999
One Sure Thing, Waterbug Records - 1996
Saturn Return, Waterbug Records - 1994
Quietly Led, Waterbug Records - 1992

Official Website

http://www.cosysheridan.com

Links

• Facebook

Audio

• The Life You've Made
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• The Land of 10,000 Mothers
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• The Weekend Workshop
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• Demeter's Lost Daughter
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• Walk On
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Lyrics

• The Land of 10,000 Mothers
• Walk On
• Demeter's Lost Daughter

Video

Photo Gallery

Press

• Sheridan Charms With Warmth, Humor [+ Show ]
  

  Cosy Sheridan knows how to make friends. She does it naturally, just by opening her mouth and singin...Cosy Sheridan knows how to make friends. She does it naturally, just by opening her mouth and singing. Sounds simple, really, but likability is a complex and wonderfuul thing. It's also a valuable quality for a folk musician... Sheridan's concert was stufffed with attributes that appeal to Troubadour subscriber's: smarts, warmth, philosophy and humor. She has a classic voice for folk tunes, with the required shimmer, sweetness and strength. Sheridan also has a nice way with an acoustic guitar. The curly-haired resident of Moab, Utah, might, however, be the first artist at WorkPlay to populate her lyrics with characters from ancient history and mythology.
  There's Iphigenia and Persephone, Hannibal and Hades. Sheridan reaches back in time for these folks and uses them to make points about the contemporary world. Sheridan might discuss serious issues - eating disorders, for example - but she's aware that her show requires balance to be effective, and that some subjects benefit from a lighter touch. Hence, Sheridan's set included "Botox Tango" , satirizing a middle-aged skin crisis, and "The Ladies Room", poking fun at the ways women cope in germy environments.
  TR Ritchie had his amusing moments as well, switching roles with Sheridan to sing leads on "Death and Taxes" and "Gadget Daddy". He provoked the most chuckles with his solo encore, playing harmonica with his nose (yes, really!) and adding the harmonics of air escaping a balloon. This, Richie called "The Oklahoma Bagpipe".
  - Mary Colurso

• cd review May 2004 [+ Show ]
  

  As with artists of any medium, musicians are sometimes faced with critics who call their latest work...As with artists of any medium, musicians are sometimes faced with critics who call their latest works "departures" and "evolutions". Most often, such words are used to convey shifts of sound, direction and perspective, and occassionally lead to exclamations that the work in question may in fact be the artist's "best to date". Usually works that inspire suc h descriptions are indeed remarkable, but the problem fro critics is often one of being so thoroughly blind-sided by a specific work that more analytical words simply don't come to the fore of their weird writers' brains. Such is the case, as you may have guessed, with Cosy Sheridan's latest release, "The Pomegranate Seed."
  It's a record written, according to Sheridcan, as an exploration of the modern woman; of appetite,body-image and myth in modern culture - "a one woman show of songs and vignettes". Rather than simply expanding upon her acclaimed wink-of-the-eye brand of cleverness and propensity for lyrical content few singer-songwriters of her generation have the muscle to take on. Sheridan went for broke on the new records, her seventh thus far. The record, in fact, is based upon Sheridan's two-act stage play of the same title. Already one of folk music's most talented and fastest-rising stars, Sheridan has never been one for stagnation. It follows then that she would deisre to take to a new stage with a new form of artistic expression.
  What the record seems to say is that not only has Sheridan found her songwriting self, she's come to a place from which she is able to survey the world in which we live and contextualize it for other human beings, particularly women. The songs span the oft passed over terriotry between the boundaries of optimism and hopefulness, and the darkness of the human experience. "The Pomegranate Seed" is Sheridan's soul bled directly to disc - imagine the live experience.

• cd review, Grand Design [+ Show ]
  

  ...Sheridan still remains the unapologetic voice of our conscience. Whether she's addressing environ......Sheridan still remains the unapologetic voice of our conscience. Whether she's addressing environmental issues or social injustice or interpersonal abuse, she deftly delivers the message with honesty and grace.

• cd review Saturn Return [+ Show ]
  

  If elitism and bottom-line mentality were not the driving forces of "mainstream" record companies......If elitism and bottom-line mentality were not the driving forces of "mainstream" record companies...Cosy Sheridan would be playing everywhere from car cds to every shoes-off-in-front-of-the-fire winter night livingroom in America.

Setlist

Set list available on request.

Basic Requirements

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