ANDREASSEN BORN AT BASSETT
Singer Returns To Coop,
‘Mythical (Natal) Land’
COOPERSTOWN – For Kristin Andreassen, the singer, poet and dancer, her Cooperstown Concert Series performance at 7:30 this Saturday at The Otesaga will be something of a homecoming.
“Point of interest – I was BORN in Cooperstown. (Yes, I’m a Bassett baby),” she wrote www.allotsego.com in an e-mail the other day. “So I’m extra psyched to be visiting.”
She was raised in Portland, Ore., but “my dad was interning at the hospital for a couple of years in the mid-70s and hence, I have a special relationship with Cooperstown.”
She called her birthplace “a mythical land named on my passport and other important bits of paperwork.”
Kristin opened for another band at the Cooperstown Concert Series in January 2015, “and, apparently, the audience enjoyed the performance enough that they ‘had to have me back’,” Mayor Jeff Katz, a CCS organizer, told her.
According to her official bio:
“Kristin is a singer, a poet and a percussive dancer who combines those skills in musical performances that are both ‘inventive’ (The New Yorker) and ‘haunting’ (NPR’s Folk Alley).
“Before embarking on her solo career, Kristin toured and recorded with both the stringband Uncle Earl (w/ Abigail Washburn, Rayna Gellert & KC Groves) and the ‘folk noir’ singing trio Sometymes Why (w/ Aoife O’Donovan & Ruth Ungar).
“She became known in those projects especially for the creativity and emotional breadth in her lyrics. Her songwriting spans the playfulness of her #1 hit children’s song ‘Crayola Doesn’t Make a Color for Your Eyes’ (featured on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion and covered by artists of all ages including Tyne Daly and several high school marching bands) and the visceral truth in her war ballad ‘How the Water Walks’ (‘Dawn has barely broken when they call us up above /I’m thinking only of my life. Sorry, my love.’).
“With her 2015 studio album debut Gondolier, Kristin began touring under her own name. Her live show made Top 10 lists at Pop Matters and NPR’s Mountain Stage last year.
“A fifth-generation Oregonian, Kristin currently resides in Nashville.”
