Artist Category: Singer/Songwriter | Page 6

Eva Westphal

Eva Westphal writes purpose-driven pop. Transparent about her coming out journey, sobriety, and mental health recovery, she encourages listeners to join her musical world of vulnerability and resilience. Each song tells a story–from the inner child healing of “Adult” and “Belong” to the queer anthems “Loud,” “Understood,” and “Proud of Me.” As a result, she has amassed 5M+ streams across DSPs and a dedicated following across platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

She is humbled by the support she has received throughout her career — from being featured in the 2023 Converse Pride Campaign, to a sold out headliner at The Mercury Lounge, to editorial support from Spotify (the cover of Noteable, Fresh Finds Pop, and features on Next Gen Singer Songwriters and GLOW, to name a few), SXSW 2024 performances, and being awarded the Music Forward/CITI 2023 LGBTQ+ Emerging Artist Award.

However, the highlights she most cherishes are the countless smaller, gratitude-filled moments she shares with fans. Eva says, “every time a fan comes up to me after a show and tells me I’ve helped them on their own journey, it reminds me why I do what I do. I really do have the best fans.” Motivated to spread self-love, and with a passionate fanbase by her side, Eva has cemented herself as a rising artist to watch in 2024.

Colin McGovern

Colin McGovern brings unpretentious, acoustic guitar based singer songwriting to the forefront with influences ranging from 60’s folk to 90’s alternative. His unexpectedly powerful tenor vocals and thoughtful narrative have distinguished him within the Passim community, where he has been featured in multiple Campfire and Oktoberfest performances, and as a special guest for the Power Outage Party.

Join us February 6 as Colin celebrates the release of his first EP, “The Salton Sea.” Produced by Zachariah Hickman, this recording has performances from many local and national folk music luminaries, such as Alisa Amador, Mark Erelli, Joe K Walsh, Elizabeth Ziman and more. This will be Colin’s first time headlining Club Passim – and he’s bringing a full band to back him up. Come and join us – and see what all the fuss is about.

Talia Schlanger

Grace for the Going (Latent Recordings) is Talia Schlanger’s intimate and explosive debut album. It’s a reflection of her reverence for the power of words, genuine love of connecting with people, and passionately eclectic musical taste. Her inspiration runs deep, from Roberta Flack’s quiet confidence to the raw freedom of Jeff Buckley, from Missy Elliott’s electric cadence to Patti Smith’s fearless poetry, and from Paul Simon’s pristine storytelling to the honest ache of Nina Simone. Schlanger’s approach to making music is the result of a lifetime of deep and broad listening, as a music fan with an open heart and hungry ears.

Known as the articulate and encyclopedic former host of the NPR-distributed radio show World Cafe, Talia has interviewed some of the most exciting musicians and artists working today. You may also recognize her as a frequent guest host of CBC’s q with Tom Power or from Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin. She has hosted numerous primetime music-related TV specials for CBC and is a Canadian Screen Award Winning producer. Talia began her professional performance career in theatre at age 14 and her various theatre credits as a singer/dancer include the original Canadian cast of Queen’s We Will Rock You and the first US tour of Green Day’s American Idiot. Schlanger has earned a reputation for her natural ability to connect with artists, especially songwriters. Yet for someone who had spent her whole life singing, she realized she was using her voice exclusively to help other musicians tell their stories. “If there’s one thing I learned from talking to artists,” Schlanger says, “it’s that nobody hands you a permission slip and says ‘you are allowed to make art now.’ You either do it or you don’t.”

While the nine songs on Grace for the Going are distinct in their musical expression, they are united by one common thread. It’s the same thread that runs through Talia Schlanger’s life on the stage, on the radio, and in the creation of this album– Schlanger has a timeless voice. She has something to say. And she means every word.

Dawn Landes

Dawn Landes is a North Carolina-based singer-songwriter whose music you might have heard if you watch The Good Wife, House or Gossip Girl. Along with releasing seven albums and five EPs since 2005, she’s a frequent collaborator with contemporaries such as Sufjan Stevens, Norah Jones and composer Nico Muhly. She has appeared with the Boston Pops, the NYC Ballet and on the TED main stage. Her musical ROW about fellow Kentucky native Tori Murden McClure’s quest to become the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean premiered in 2021 at Williamstown Theatre Festival and is available on Audible. Her latest release is The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, an album of folk songs that leads us through a history of women’s activism from the 1800’s through the high times of Women’s Lib in the 1970’s. The album was produced by her longtime collaborator Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman) and features guests including Emily Frantz (Watchhouse, formerly Mandolin Orange), Kanene Pipkin (The Lone Bellow) Charly Lowry, Rissi Palmer and Lizzy Ross (Violet Bell).

Sophie Garrigus

Sophie M. Garrigus is a true multi-hyphenate with talents spanning acting, singing, writing, comedy, composition, and more. Currently enrolled at Harvard, she has crafted her artistic journey with a delightful blend of silly fearlessness and an unwavering passion for discovering the light and levity in life.

Growing up in Los Angeles, a city of creativity, Garrigus was immersed in the world of performance from an early age. She has contributed to many artistic communities herself, cultivating a vast interdisciplinary family and performing everywhere from overseas at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Mira Rose Kingsbury-Lee’s musical “Atalanta” to on-campus improv shows.

Recently, she has been working with the Hasty Pudding Theatricals in an exciting new capacity as a co-writer of their upcoming 2024 comedy musical.

Garrigus has contributed to many artistic communities herself, cultivating a vast interdisciplinary family and performing everywhere from overseas at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Mira Rose Kingsbury-Lee ’24’s musical “Atalanta” to on-campus improv shows.

Recently, she has been working with the Hasty Pudding Theatricals in an exciting new capacity as a co-writer of their upcoming 2024 comedy musical.

Finn Hansbury

Finn Hansbury is a folk-rock songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist currently based in Boston, Massachusetts. A current Berklee College of Music student, Finn has a knack for pouring raw emotion into his work and pulling raw emotion out of his audiences. His intimate style of storytelling is one that both delights and haunts listeners. Finn often uses his craft as a channel to express his innermost vulnerabilities without sugarcoating the truth, and it is this trait that draws people in. Hailing from Bar Harbor, Maine, a small town on Mount Desert Island, Finn grew up relatively isolated from a lot of the world. Through his songwriting, he shares his unique perspective to connect with like-minded individuals while expanding the perspectives of others.

Jenny Owen Youngs

In the decade since Jenny Owen Youngs last released a full-length album, she’s toured the world, co-written a #1 hit single, launched a wildly popular podcast, landed a book deal, placed songs in a slew of films and television series, moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to coastal Maine, and gotten married, divorced, and married again. She’s done everything, it seems, except release another album.

Yet now with her exceptional new Yep Roc debut, Avalanche, Youngs delivers a main course worthy of the wait. Written with a series of friends including S. Carey, Madi Diaz, The Antlers’ Peter Silberman, and Christian Lee Hutson and recorded with producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, The Hold Steady, Cassandra Jenkins, Josh Ritter), the collection is an achingly beautiful exploration of loss, resilience, and growth from an artist who’s experienced more than her fair share of each in recent years. The songs are deceptively serene here, layering Youngs’ infectious pop sensibilities atop lush, dreamy arrangements that often belie the swift emotional currents lurking underneath. The performances, meanwhile, are riveting and nuanced to match, gentle yet insistent as they reckon with the pain of regret and the joy of redemption, sometimes in the very same breath. The result is the most raw and arresting release of Youngs’ remarkable career, a brutally honest, deeply vulnerable work of self-reflection that learns to make peace with the past as it transforms doubt and grief into hope and transcendence.

That kind of range has been Youngs’ calling card from the very start. Born and raised in rural New Jersey, she fell in love with The Beatles at an early age before eventually finding her way to The Cranberries and Elliott Smith in high school. Her self-recorded debut, Batten Down The Hatches, landed a high-profile sync in the Showtime series Weeds and led to a deal with Nettwerk Records, which re-released the album along with her 2009 follow-up, Transmitter Failure. Widespread acclaim and dates with the likes of Regina Spektor, Ingrid Michaelson, Frank Turner, and Aimee Mann followed, but by the time Youngs released her third album, 2012’s An Unwavering Band Of Light, she was ready for a change of pace, moving to LA to focus on writing for other artists and for film and TV. In 2016, Youngs co-wrote Pitbull’s “Bad Man,” which debuted at the 58th annual Grammy Awards; in 2017, she co-wrote Shungudzo’s “Come On Back,” which was featured in the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack; and in 2018, she co-wrote Panic! At The Disco’s smash hit “High Hopes,” which went five-times platinum and broke the record for most weeks atop Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart. Along the way, Youngs also launched Buffering The Vampire Slayer, an episode-by-episode podcast devoted to Buffy The Vampire Slayer that attracted more than 160,000 monthly listeners and led to a book deal with St. Martin’s Press. Youngs recently launched a new series with her podcasting partner/ex-wife called The eX-Files and has a narrative fiction podcast due out next year, as well.

Alicia Blue

Born and raised in the last eastern town of LA County, just steps from the San Bernardino line, the daughter of a truck driver father and bank teller mom, Alicia Blue is no stranger to desolate landscapes. Desolation is something that comes to mind when recalling her childhood, despite her insistence that she is also a “closeted optimist.”

Working multiple jobs to pay rent while in college, Alicia stumbled upon a job helping to take care of an aging soul singer named Malcolm Hayes, Jr who’d been disabled from a stroke. It was that fateful meeting that opened the doors to her realizing she needed to set her words to music as a means to reach people…and it was Malcolm who first said to her, “Why are you so blue?” Up until then, Alicia had never played more than a few chords on guitar for fun at an old boyfriend’s house. But she was determined to learn to play for real and studied and practiced relentlessly. In 2015, Alicia Blue did her first open mic and started writing her first songs. Alicia began busking around LA, playing every open mic and opening shows whenever she could. One of her first recorded songs, “Magma,” was featured by Starbucks in their stores worldwide and on their Spotify playlist and brought her a good amount of attention. By 2020, Alicia had established herself in the LA music scene as a true poet / songwriter.

In 2021, Alicia Blue started spending a lot of time in Nashville writing and working on new music. This led to a deeply creative period in which she began collaborating with people like John Paul White (Civil Wars), Sadler Vaden (Jason Isbell) and Lincoln Parish (Cage the Elephant), setting the stage for what would become 2022’s release Inner Child Work, produced by Lincoln Parish and recorded in Nashville.

The following spring 2022, Alicia packed up her life and relocated to Nashville.

In late summer 2023, Alicia recorded a new batch of songs with producer Dan Knobler (Allison Russell). She caught the attention of legendary producer/songwriter Butch Walker that year, bringing them together to write for her album, and even having him feature on one of her songs. That winter, Alicia Blue was named one of American Songwriter’s 16 Artists to Watch. During this same period, Alicia Blue’s music was discovered by the Jack Kerouac Estate curators and asked to compose a song inspired by the soon-to-be-released Kerouac collected writings, “Self Portrait.” After meeting in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, MA, they invited her to stay for a few days and record at Jack’s former home in St. Petersburg, FL just after her tour with Lucinda Williams. There she got to stay in Jack’s room and sleep in his bed while going on to record three songs with Kerouac lyrics and do a live broadcast. She is solidly endorsed by the Kerouac Estate and even thanked in the first printing of “Self Portrait.”

Alicia Blue wrapped her second year in Nashville with one final meeting that would consecrate her path and place as a songwriter, in which she got to give an impromptu performance of her songs for the legendary Lucinda Williams at a party. That led to Lucinda featuring on her upcoming single, “Tennessee,” (out July 2024) and a growing friendship between the two that led to Alicia joining her out on tour in early 2024. With singles from her new album hitting each month throughout 2024, plus the success of her second single “Tennessee,” released in July and still going strong, and a growing and important presence on the Nashville scene, Alicia Blue, is already looking toward the future and writing for her next album to be produced by Butch Walker in early 2025.

Thea Hopkins

A member of Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe of Martha’s Vineyard MA, performing songwriter Thea Hopkins calls her music – Red Roots Americana. She has been described as a “standout writer” by the Washington Post.

In Spring 2024, she was selected to attend the First Nations gathering and the ISPA Congress in Perth, Australia as a Western Arts Alliance artist delegate.

Thea was an official showcase artist at the International Indigenous Music Summit, held in Toronto in June 2023.

In January 2023, Thea received an artist award from the Newport Festivals Foundation in support of her new album, “Here In Our World” to be released in January 2025.

She was an Official Showcase Artist at Folk Alliance International in 2022.

Her program, “In The Roundhouse”, a celebration of traditional and contemporary Indigenous music, debuted in Providence RI in September 2021.

In May 2021, Thea was selected by Folk Alliance International as part of Team USA, for Global Music Match, an internationally artist led collaborative effort.

Thea’s song, “The Ghost Of Emmett Till”, from her highly praised 2018 EP, “Love Come Down” was awarded the grand prize by the Great American Song Contest in March 2021. There were over 1900 entries from forty three countries.

Her EP “Love Come Down’, was nominated for a 2019 Indigenous Music Award in the folk category, an international competition. She created, in just six tunes, an elegant and seamless song journey that begins with a gentle invocation (“Love Come Down”), ends with a lullaby (“Until Then”) and gracefully travels to a few dark American landscapes in between.  From love ballad to social history, every song is personal. The scope of the EP – touching upon Americana, folk and pop — can be seen by the choice of musicians. Jazz trumpeter Tom Halter (Either Orchestra) explores haunting new directions on four songs. “Mississippi River, Mississippi Town” features the electric “ebow” guitar of David Minehan (The Neighborhoods, The Replacements.) The pianist Tim Ray (formerly with Lyle Lovett) is prominent, and plaintive, on “Almost Upon a Time.” The song “Tamson Weeks” is sparked by violinist Mimi Rabson of the Really Esoteric String Quartet. It tells the story of Hopkins’ great-great aunt, a medicine woman of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Indian tribe of Martha’s Vineyard. On her timely ballad, “The Ghost of Emmett Till,” Noel Paul Stookey (the Paul of P,P & M) adds his quietly dramatic guitar and harmony vocals.

In June 2019, Thea was selected by the Western Arts Alliance as a 2019 Native Launchpad Artist, a three-year artist development program. To cap off 2019, Thea was selected for the Wichoie Ahiya Indigenous Singer Songwriter Intensive at the Banff Arts Centre in Alberta, Canada. Thea was a Native Arts and Cultures fellowship recipient in 2017.

She first came to wider public notice when Peter, Paul & Mary recorded her song “Jesus Is On The Wire” in 2004, and then again in 2010 with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. It is considered one of their later signature songs.

In addition to Aquinnah Wampanoag, Hopkins ‘ ancestry includes Nottoway (Iroquois), African American, Irish and Portuguese. In other words, Red Roots Americana.

Rosa Joe Jacobs

Rosa Joe Jacobs is a Brooklyn-bred, Boston-based songwriter and musician. While her songs draw from folk traditions, Rosa is less interested in fitting within genre boundaries and far more devoted to creating music that makes people feel connected. Connected to themselves, to each other, and to something larger. Rosa is currently working on her debut project, a collection of original songs recorded at The Bungaleau in Eau Claire, WI, and at Q Division Studios in Somerville, MA. The Record is set to release in 2026.