Cindy lee berryhill biography of donald

Cindy Lee Berryhill has had an interesting life. Going through a tragedy that would break anyone’s heart, writing music that has biting wit combined with beautiful, wistful vocals and raising a son on her own is more than enough for a talented singer-songwriter. Her husband, Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy! magazine, passed away this past March from complications due to early onset dementia, after a bicycling accident resulted in a traumatic brain injury. Considered a pioneer in the field of music journalism, as well as the man who helped bring legendary science fiction author Philip K. Dick back from obscurity, Williams was certainly an important and impressive man.

I chatted with Berryhill about her upcoming performance at the Old Mill Inn, apparently her first performance since the passing of her husband, as well as her songwriting for her new album. “We’re starting to record now. I’ve been writing, while also serving as caretaker for my husband and trying to raise a young child,” Berryhill said. “It’s a thrill putting the arrangement together and finding musicians, so I’m very excited to be working on a new album.”

Berryhill, who maintains the popular blog, Beloved Stranger (also the name of her 2007 album), speaks frankly about her life with Williams, as well as her son, Alexander. Berryhill was open and honest, showing the kind of woman she is—a strong-willed, smart and hardworking mother and artist. Her latest blog entry, “Caregiving Talk Part 2” is filled with insightful information, but also personal anecdotes about her husband, along with some wonderful photographs of their life together.

“I made a decision about three years ago, to put my husband in a nursing home, due to the dementia, and I wanted to write songs about life and kind of kick back to the points of inspiration,” Berryhill said. “I would say the last album had a strong family influence, Beloved Stranger, that a

SAN DIEGO — As if Ireland hasn’t had enough problems, locally grown nufolk priestess Cindy Lee Berryhill unwittingly smuggled another one into her ancestral homeland last year. At the time, she had already spent a couple of mostly uneventful months playing her way through the Netherlands, Belgium and Great Britain. Then Berryhill traveled to Belfast to tape a song for a BBC political program.

“I had opened two weeks’ worth of shows in England and Scotland for Christy Moore, and it was great. Then, I’m in Ireland for only 24 hours and I get into this mess,” said a laughing Berryhill in a recent phone call from her latest refuge in Taos, N.M.

“Apparently, BBC radio had been playing my song, ‘Baby (Should I Have the Baby?).’ And there was also an article about me in The (London) Times. Well, Britain’s answer to Phyllis Shafly got wind of this American girl singing songs about abortion, and she started a call-in campaign to get my song off the air. By the time I got to Belfast, it was really a big deal. But I kinda liked it, ‘cause it meant putting controversy back into folk, where it belongs.”

Berryhill’s fans will be glad to hear that the 26-year-old singer-songwriter didn’t drop off the face of the earth. Of course, if she had, Berryhill undoubtedly would have made an indelible imprint wherever she landed.

A few years ago, the graduate of Ramona High School was ubiquitous on the San Diego music scene, accompanying herself on guitar at such clubs as Drowsy Maggie’s and Bodie’s, and occasionally opening shows for the Beat Farmers. Then a demo tape of hers landed at Rhino Records and fame came calling.

In a music world suddenly reinvestigating folk music, Berryhill’s 1987 debut, “Who’s Gonna Save the World?” was a back-to-the-future revelation. On it, Berryhill braided together grass-roots politics, no-fri

First emerging as a witty, self-aware West Coast delegate to the mid-’80s fast folk movement, Cindy Lee Berryhill always bore a broader agenda than what could be achieved with a single guitar. Not that she wasn’t perfectly able to put over clever original songs with simple apparatus (as she did on her first two albums), but Berryhill didn’t reach her creative stride until her rebirth as a more ambitious pop auteur on 1994’s delightfully baroque Garage Orchestra.

On the debut, Cindy Lee comes off as an endearing flake who at times may remind you of a folky Patti Smith or a female Jonathan Richman in his Modern Lovers days. Like them, she’s no great singer or musician, but her songs, mostly about middle-class adolescent and post-adolescent life crises (alienation, drug addiction, suicide) not only ring true, they do so without lapsing into cliché or self-pity. There’s also an ironic sense of humor at work, best seen in “Damn, Wish I Was a Man,” a catalogue of reasons for penis envy that contains such gems as “Wish I was a man, I’d be sexy with a belly like Jack Nicholson.”

For Naked Movie Star, producer Lenny Kaye beefed up Berryhill’s musical surroundings, expanding and amplifying the lineup (an acoustic trio on the debut) on a number of songs. In fact, after a couple, you may think Cindy Lee’s working on becoming Southern California’s female Springsteen. Fortunately, the first album’s spirited quirkiness eventually re-emerges, complete with a new set of purposeful musical reference points that include Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan, Peggy Lee, the Beach Boys and Patti Smith. Naked Movie Star moves Berryhill into new areas while remaining true to what made her interesting in the first place.

Garage Orchestra, an army of instrumentalists — playing everything from clarinet and cello to banjo, vibraphone and tympani — helps Berryhill

American singer-songwriter

Musical artist

Cindy Lee Berryhill (born June 12, 1965) is an American singer-songwriter, co-founder of the New York Antifolk movement, who recorded multiple albums, hit singles, and compilations over the years.

Early life and education

Berryhill was born in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California and grew up in various parts of California. She began playing the guitar at the age of ten, which then led to her love of songwriting.

Career

Berryhill's debut album Who's Gonna Save The World? (Rhino/Capitol) came out in October 1987 and was followed by the Lenny Kaye-produced Naked Movie Star (Rhino/WEA) in 1989. In Allmusic's onlineCindy Lee Berryhill Biography entry (2008), Richie Unterberger wrote, "The San Diegan's 1987 debut, Who's Gonna Save the World?, may be her best simply because it is her most straightforward. Then as now, she was most effective, ironically, at her most basic and serious." By contrast, Stewart Mason in his four-and-a-half-star review of her third album, calls it her "first completely solid and intriguing effort".

Berryhill, like Brenda Kahn, Paleface, Beck, Michelle Shocked and John S. Hall, was an early proponent of the New York City Anti-folk movement. She is featured in the documentary Mariposa: Under a Stormy Sky along with Emmylou Harris, The Violent Femmes, Daniel Lanois and others.

It would be another six years before her third album Garage Orchestra (Cargo/Earth) would be released. Garage Orchestra was a Tin Pan Alley-inflected departure from her earlier folkier albums and garnered a 4-star review in Rolling Stone.

In 1995 her boyfriend and husband-to-be, rock writer Paul Williams, suffered a brain injury in a bicycle accident, and Berryhill put off the making of her next album until 1996's Straight Outta Marysville.

In 1999, Berryhill's novel, M