Cosy Sheridan has been called "one of the era's finest and most
thoughtful singer/songwriters." She has played everywhere from
Carnegie Hall to the Philadelphia Folk Festival and
is the winner of numerous songwriting awards. Her music has appeared
in best-selling author Robert Fulghum's book, Third Wish,
as well as on The Dr. Demento Show and NPR's Car Talk.
Now, in her critically acclaimed new CD Eros (WindRiver),
Sheridan weaves a cycle of songs about love.
"We fall in love with being in love - a sort of romantic perfection,"
she says. But, she reminds us, we live in a fallen world, and love
inevitably disappoints. The songs on this new recording show us the
beauty of the journey beyond disappointment to wisdom. This is the story
of longing in the blood and the bone / whatever it is you love, that
you're longing to come home.
Love. Longing. Home. These are the themes of the myth of Psyche and Eros,
and the theme of this smart and elegant CD. Her guitar work shines - a
testament to years of honing her craft (she was a student of both Eric
Schoenberg and Guy Van Duser) as does her voice: an instrument of warm
shimmering timbre.
Together with her partner TR Ritchie, an award-winning songwriter himself,
this is one of the most entertaining and intelligent touring acts on the
folk concert circuit. Sheridan is a storyteller as well as songwriter;
she moves seamlessly from lyrical story into song and back again. Her
modern renditions of mythology (meet Hades as a biker) have won her fans
and praise from the press. The Cornell Folksong Society says,
"Sheridan is frank, feisty, sublimely and devilishly funny. She fuses
myth with modern culture; Persephone with Botox."
She first appeared on the national folk scene in 1992 when she won the
songwriting contests at both 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 8 more CDs and written a one-woman show:
The Pomegranate Seed - An Exploration of Appetite, Body Image
and Myth in Modern Culture, and co-founded The Moab Folk Camp
with Ritchie. She is a regular songwriting and performance teacher at adult
music camps across the country, among them The Puget Sound Guitar Workshop
in Washington and The Swannanoa Gathering in North Carolina.
Is Cosy Sheridan "one of the best new singer-songwriters in the United States?"
..."A Buddhist monk in a 12-step program trapped in the body of a singer-songwriter?"
..."A very funny and enormously amiable entertainer, with a keen
and wicked eye for the excesses of our fast-food, tv-happy and noisome culture?"
According to critics across the country, all of the above. Cosy's own
favorite is still one she once received from a young woman in the audience
after a concert: "You're so REAL!"
