It's no wonder Elizabeth Cook has become a talented singer/songwriter, her life has been much like a country song. The youngest of 11 half-brothers and sisters, she grew up in rural Florida where her musician parents met while playing in local country bars. Elizabeth had her own band at the age of nine and performed prolifically throughout her school years.

Elizabeth graduated from Georgia Southern University in 1996 and accepted a job offer from Price Waterhouse. But her gift for music proved inescapable and the young accountant signed a publishing deal within a year. She released the independent album Elizabeth Cook/The Blue Album in 2000, and made her major label debut in 2002 with Hey Y'All. In 2004, Elizabeth released This Side of the Moon, drawing raves ranging from The New York Times to No Depression. Through it all, Elizabeth remained a relentless performer, playing shows across America and overseas and well over 200 performances at the Grand Ole Opry.

Elizabeth's most recent album Balls, which producer Rodney Crowell describes as "a very 'indie' album," bounces from the box with the hardcore hillbilly abandon of "Times Are Tough In Rock N' Roll," to the more delicate "Down Girl," a tender ode to survival. But it's the album's centerpiece that has already taken on a life of its own as a runaway anthem for strong women everywhere. "I started writing "Sometimes It Takes Balls" as a joke," Elizabeth says, "and never thought I'd ever perform it live."

"I write what I love," says Elizabeth, "And I love to communicate what I write. Most of all, I write to help heal myself. With this album, I want people to feel like they got a laugh and got a cry. I want people to feel understood, if only for a few minutes."

Nanci Griffith

Whether performing her own poetically evocative material or the compositions of her influences, friends, and peers, Nanci Griffith possesses a powerful gift for inhabiting the songs she sings. In the course of her career, now spanning nearly three decades, Griffith has shown she is a writer of startling depth and subtlety. With her gifts as a songwriter lending invaluable insight, Griffith has also grown into a formidable interpreter of other people's songs, as demonstrated on such albums as the Grammy Award-winning Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Griffith began performing at the tender age of 14. Her career started to blossom in the late 70s and early 80s, with the release of her first two independent recordings, There's A Light Beyond These Woods and Poet In My Window. These were followed by the release of two other albums, Once In A Very Blue Moon and Last Of The True Believers, which was nominated for a Grammy.

Mary Gauthier

From a turbulent Louisiana childhood to an adulthood filled with accomplishment and devastation, Mary Gauthier's songs are mixed with hope and anguish, as well as faith and fear. This wide range of emotions filled her first two self-released albums Dixie Kitchen and Drag Queens in Limousines, as well an indie-label release Filth and Fire.

However, it was her breakthrough album, Mercy Now released in 2005 that began to garner national acclaim. The album was continuously "discovered" and lauded in the two years following its release, earning mentions on a score of year end "best of" lists in '05, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and No Depression. Her most recent release, Between Daylight and Dark has been called "...a triumph that should catapult her to the forefront of Americana singer/songwriter," by Paste Magazine and she has been
celebrated by the Los Angeles Times as "a unique, intrinsically valuable musical voice. And there's never a surplus of those."

Her performances on Between Daylight and Dark reflect her growth not just as a songwriter, but as an artist. Unlike Mercy Now, which was assembled layer upon layer, with each part recorded in sequence, Between Daylight and Dark was cut live, with only an occasional solo or vocal snippet added afterward.