Courtlyn Carr “Spellbound”

Recorded and mixed by Steven LaFashia at Forge Recording.

Courtlyn Carr is a prolific American singer/songwriter/composer, and multi-instrumentalist who crosses many genres with her music. Growing up within the suburbs of Washington, DC in a family of music fanatics, she was exposed to genres ranging from jazz, classical, mo-town, country, blues, rock, hip-hop, and R&B. “A typical Saturday night in my family was me singing in my onsies to Petty, Hendrix, Bowie, Neil Young, Elvis, and Sinatra records on my Dad’s five foot speakers”, says Courtlyn. At the age of five, her parents enrolled her in classical piano and voice lessons coupled with theater training, which she continued throughout her teenage years. She formed two local rock bands, then composed and completed her first independent full length, never to be released album by the age of seventeen. In 2007, she graduated from The Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA as a recipient of the honorary World Scholarship Tour. Every year, she traveled with Berklee’s songwriting department to Nashville, Tennessee which inspired her to move there in 2009. She went on to spend the next three years composing and performing in songwriting circles at venues such as the infamous Bluebird Cafe. This explains her original storytelling style with a hint of country founded in her 2009 EP, “Turn Blue”, in which she collaborated with Emmy Lou Harris’s fiddle player, Ricki Simpkins, as well as Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Grammy award winning engineer, Jim Robenson.

She went on to share the stage with such acts as: Martina McBride, Little Big Town, The Steel Drivers, Mountain Heart, and Phil Vassar.

“I was able to really focus on the craft of songwriting in Nashville, but I felt trapped in one genre and was ready to go back to my pre-rock roots”, says Courtlyn. Since she takes cues from classic writers such as: Tom Waits, Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Webb, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, and even Chris Martin, you can see why it’s hard to peg down a particular influence or genre for her music. In 2012, she decided to move to Philadelphia, PA where she has spent the last two years composing and recording at the Milk Boy Studios (home studio of The Roots, Studio 4, and Ruffhouse Records). In 2013, her high energy performance style and gutsy vocals (perfect for classic rock) landed her a temporary position as the lead female vocalist for “The Leg Warmers”. She traveled the east coast fronting one of its top 80’s tribute bands, which may have inspired a few of her current throwback tongue-and-cheek tracks, only to add one more genre to her mix.

Her “Moody-soul pop” style has drawn comparisons to: Coldplay, Adele, Lorde, Radiohead, Alicia Keys, and John Legend. She has composed many “Broadway-esque” scores reminiscent of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Burt Bacharach. “Some of her latest compositions intro like a Tom Waits song leading you into a scene of a Woody Allen film.”, says four time Grammy award winning producer and engineer, Phil Nicolo. Courtlyn currently resides in Philadelphia, PA where she is nearing the completion of her full length LP album, which is expected to be released sometime in the Fall of 2014.

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