Carrie Newcomer is a singer, songwriter, Quaker, Midwesterner, goodwill ambassador, and inspiring performer. Billboard Magazine has described her as a “soaring songstress,” the Boston Globe has called her a “prairie mystic,” and Rolling Stone says that she “asks all the right questions.” Questions, not answers – Carrie tends to take a modest approach. “You never talk much in a fishing boat / cause it scares the fish away,” she sings on “My Father’s Only Son” – “you just give it time / and watch your line.” Carrie has been giving time to music since her first album with Stone Soup in 1984. Since then, she’s recorded more than a dozen solo albums, as well as appearing on several compilations. She’s sung duets with Alison Krauss and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Nickel Creek recorded her song “I Should’ve Known Better” on a Grammy-winning album. Folk Wax has twice given her their Artist of the Year award, and Chicago’s WFMT named her one of “the 50 most influential folk musicians of the past 50 years.” This year she’s released a new album, A Permeable Life, and published a collection of poems and essays with the same title.

Music and service have been intertwined in Carrie’s life. She co-founded the Soup Bowl Benefit, which has raised more than a million dollars over the past 20 years to feed Indiana’s hungry families. In 2009 and 2011, she served as a cultural ambassador to India, which led to the album Everything Is Everywhere, a collaboration with Indian masters of the classical sarod, with the proceeds benefiting the Interfaith Hunger Initiative. She visited Kenya in 2012, performing in schools, hospitals, and clinics. In 2013, she visited the Middle East, working with organizations dedicated to the arts and to non-violent conflict resolution. “There is no point / if the point is not taken,” she sings on “Straight to the Point” – and the point is, Carrie is a grownup, a mature artist with a generous vision that she delivers in one great song after another. Her voice has the jazzy, smoky depth of Joni Mitchell in her later recordings, and her lyrics are incisive and insightful. The point is, check her out!

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