bio

The music of Kristen Cothron is born from a dark Southern psyche charred by half-burned cigarette ash then soaked in sweet tea.

Kristen's musical career began early. She was onstage at 13, singing the standards, but at some point she dropped out of the jazz clubs, dropped out of Berklee College of Music, and was dropped onto the dim stages of the Nashville alternative scene, where her persona took shape, took a drag, slid into thigh-high boots, and then got fed-back and distorted through an amplifier. Kristen carries her jazz background the way a gunfighter carries a rosary. To Kristen, jazz is heritage. It is interwoven in her twisted roots, inseparable, but masked by the mysterious character that has grown out of it.

2006's Love Letters from a Fool marked the beginning of her on-going collaboration with producer Ben Strano and signaled that a strong, strange, and sexy iconoclast had arrived to destroy and rebuild the temple of the female singer-songwriters.

Kristen builds further on this foundation with her latest, Show Me Where the Edge Is, a bold new work with Strano that showcases her expert songwriting alongside that of her strongest musical influence, Elvis Costello. Whether on the three Costello re-workings or her own originals, each of the 13 vocal takes is impeccable - Cothron is truly a singer's singer, equally at home nailing one-take vocals in the studio and entrancing live audiences. Producer Ben Strano says, "If I could only listen to (or record) one voice for the rest of my life... I'd want it to be Kristen. She sings so effortlessly that the barrier between what she sings and what she feels is non existent... a pure channel between emotion and voice that few if any can match. Normally a singer is hindered by what their voice will actually allow them to do. Kristen doesn't have this (seemingly mortal) problem."