Shawn Colvin

Born in Vermillion, South Dakota, and raised between Carbondale, Illinois, and London, Ontario, Shawn Colvin learned guitar at an early age and spent the 1970s and 1980s playing in various folk, rock and country-swing bands from Austin to Berkeley and then New York. She became part of the Greenwich Village folk scene around the Fast Folk collective while also working as a backing vocalist, notably with Suzanne Vega, with whom she toured in the late 1980s. That period led to Steady On in 1989, her debut solo album, which established a precise, narrative songwriting style situated between contemporary folk, Americana and country-folk, with restrained vocals and uncluttered acoustic or pop arrangements. Colvin followed with Fat City (1992), Cover Girl (1994) and A Few Small Repairs (1996), which produced “Sunny Came Home,” a track honored at the Grammy Awards in 1998. A fixture on American stages in the 1990s, including Lilith Fair, she later released Whole New You (2001), These Four Walls (2006), All Fall Down (2012), Uncovered (2015), Colvin & Earle (2016) with Steve Earle, and The Starlighter (2018).