Taylor Barton

Chances are you have heard, met, or worked with Taylor Barton: a smart, multi-talented, singer-songwriter, actress, writer, playwright, poet, dancer, and film producer. She has spent over three decades traversing the arts and culminated into a 21st century Renaissance woman. Born in Baltimore, Maryland she started her musical training with piano lessons at age six. She enrolled in the Peabody Institute at age thirteen where she studied dance until her high school graduation. Music and lyrics were always her passion and while frequenting the local bars in Fells Point. She was fascinated and inspired by her hometown heroes, Tom Waits, Lowell George, and John Waters. Moving to NYC she carved out a career with her intelligent, clever, and quirky perspective on life.
During a fortuitous appearance on Saturday Night Live, she met bandleader GE Smith. Smith later became her husband, co-producer, and partner in their independent label, Green Mirror Music. Smith was instrumental in jump-starting Barton's songwriting by putting a guitar in her hands, and exposing her to an array of legendary performers from Dylan to Garcia, and everyone ultra-talented thereafter. She has clearly succeeded in creating a distinctive body of work that is highly accessible - very unique and original.
Vanity Fair calls her voice beautiful and seductive. Rolling Stone calls her beguiling and raves about her recordings. Frank Hadley of The Boston Herald describes her voice as achingly superb. David Sprague of Newsday – she waxes poetic without slipping into pretense and uses decidedly non-hallmark phraseology. She has created her own musical niche, and can't be pigeon holed with her signature dreamy melodic rhythms.
Barton’s music is memorable, haunting, and deeply mysterious. Barton captures a wealth of knowledge and spirit in her music delivering evocative landscapes of both body and soul. Her live shows are also intimately polished. Philadelphia's Cutting Edge: she charms her audiences with a chameleon-like versatility, using gutsy theatrics that are never overdone.
Her film, 50 Watt Fuse, documenting her husband’s career as a sideman, was an Official Selection of the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2006. Written and directed by Barton, cameos from Lorne Michaels, Jimmy Buffett, and Bob Dylan, to Hall & Oates, gave Barton a standing ovation.
2009 brings her back to songwriting. She will release her 7th solo CD, “Spiritual Gangster,” in the fall of 09. A beautifully crafted new collection of songs, featuring well-polished songs produced by Pink Floyd’s Keyboardist, Jon Carin and Barton, The backing band includes her husband, GE Smith, and veteran musicians, Tony Shanahan, (Patty Smith) Robin Gould, Alex Alexander (Dido) and the new, sexy songstress, GiGi Fouquet on background vocals., This is a disc for constant rotation.
The conception: “I was sitting outside the Rubin Museum, pissed off… I couldn’t get into some sold-out “sacred seminar, when I got to thinking that anything of spirit was stellar in NYC. So, I set off to write a bunch of songs about things that either had fed my spirit or had stolen it;”
“Taylor Barton writes from the trenches of the self-examined life; motherhood, sobriety , vision-quest, rock wife-dom, grief, longing, beauty, meaning…With soul mate G.E. Smith as her sideman, she creates aching American classics on Spiritual Gangster". --Paula Cole
Her single, Not the Kind You Keep charted on AC stations and was featured on NBC’s ‘ED’. Other songs have been featured on Saturday Night Live, Conan, and Disney soundtracks. Her four previous releases, received rave reviews as well. She is the recipient of ten consecutive ASCAP Popular Panel Awards that she received in 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, and 1994.