Elizabeth Devlin
New York City, New York, United States
Music
Press
"Elizabeth Devlin croons brassy dreams over Autoharp"
- Time Out New York / Issue 723 : Aug 6–12, 2009
"If you like CocoRosie and Jolie Holland you'll like the sound of Elizabeth Devlin. Armed only with an Autoharp, she sings of the loveless and unrequited with the sweetest intonation. What beautifully sickly sweet music she does make. She released 'All Are Relative' at the end of last year. You can also catch her in the North of England before she floats back to her haven of New York. Ahhh."
- -Super Ace, London/UK Blog, May 2009
"Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the autoharp. This song sounds like something you'd find on a gramophone record."
- -Lauren Groff, Largehearted Boy Blog, Feb. 2009
Discography
All Are Relative. 44 min. New York: Self-Released 2008.
Photos
Bio
Elizabeth Devlin invokes influences from scratchy phonographs, combining bitter sweet, haunting vocals with poignant lyrics and angelic, cacophonous melodies. Papa Devlin fancied himself a gypsy and traveled the coast peddling his one-man-band street performance; Momma was a writer, who tended many children and hand sewed puppets to sell on the DC streets. Pulling these things to her, Elizabeth's performance art began as lyrical, melodic, acapella poetry but soon blossomed into an electroacoustic sound when she began to play the Autoharp.
"All Are Relative", Elizabeth's debut full length album, self-released in Dec. 2008, offers up a delicious residual hum of dreams and fantastic things. The ear should eat this album in one sitting. Elizabeth's vocal style is heavily influenced by singers such as Edith Piaf, Snow White, Patsy Cline and Billy Holiday. Her lyrical peotry is inspired by musicians like Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and Dar Williams. Elizabeth's fragile, textured melodies and instrumental sounds are influenced by avant garde sound masters Tom Waits, La Monte Young and Radiohead.
Although the individual tracks of "All Are Relative" run a gamut of genre associations, touching on blues, traditional folk, french waltz and a capella, they were conceived as symbiotic pieces intertwined, parts of a dynamic storybook, an audible, cerebral landscape. "All Are Relative" was recorded and produced with friend and musician, Kyle Avallone, in small town Belmar, New Jersey, located three blocks from the ocean, in a hundred-year-old house with creaky steps, a leaky attic, and several orphaned inhabitants.
Elizabeth toured the United States twice in 2009, once as a back-up singer for Larkin Grimm (Young God Records) and as a solo artist, where she played several unofficial showcases at SXSW. In April, Elizabeth joined Canadian band Genevieve et Matthieu for a brief tour in Quebec before departing for a three week European tour, which was highlighted by a supporting slot for Jeffrey Lewis at El Lokal in Zurich, Switzerland along with performances in Ireland, London, Germany and France.
Elizabeth Devlin is the two-time recipient of the Common Ground On the Hill, Roots Music & Arts Memorial Scholarship through which, she attended Traditions Music Workshops in 2007 & 2008. Also in 2008, Elizabeth was awarded the Mary Lou Orthey Scholarship to attend the Mt. Laurel Autoharp Gathering where she received the Leonard A. Reid Peoples Choice Award for Outstanding Vocal Performance.
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