Laura Cantrell life and biography

Born and raised in Nashville, Laura Cantrell moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, where she soon found herself hosting a weekly country music program on college station WKCR ("Tennessee Border") and singing in dorms and coffeehouses. After graduation, she recorded a CD and several singles with the band Bricks, featuring her college friend Mac McCaughan (who would later form Superchunk and Merge Records). A move to Brooklyn led to a friendship with John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, who recruited her to sing on "The Guitar" on the band's 1992 album Apollo 18. He also offered to produce an EP of Laura's original songs for the Giants' "Hello CD of the Month Club" subscription service, which was originally released in June 1996 and reissued in 2004 as The Hello Recordings.

In 2000, Cantrell's debut album, Not the Tremblin' Kind, reached an international audience and was championed by legendary BBC DJ John Peel, who called it "my favorite record of the last 10 years and possibly my life." She recorded five Peel Sessions and had three songs on his annual "Festive Fifty" for 2000.

With the release of When the Roses Bloom Again in 2002, she was handpicked by Elvis Costello to open 17 dates on his U.S. tour. Both albums also garnered four-star reviews in Rolling Stone and led to appearances on the Grand Ole Opry, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, the Newport Folk Festival, World Café and Mountain Stage, as well as tours with folk legends Joan Baez and Ralph Stanley in the U.S. and U.K.

She released Humming by the Flowered Vine in 2005 on Matador Records. The album includes a version of the Appalachian murder ballad "Poor Ellen Smith," which was collected and published in the 1927 book American Mountain Songs by Laura's great, great aunt Ethel Park Richardson, a "song catcher" from Chattanooga, Tenn., who went on to produce the NBC radio drama Heart-throbs of the Hills throughout the 1930s.

Cantrell is also the "proprietress" of the long-running Radio Thrift Shop on free form WFMU-FM in Jersey City, N.J.

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