Shannon Wright

The story goes that Shannon Wright recorded all of her music alone, in quiet, isolated places where she was surrounded only by abandoned houses and dusty, red dirt roads. That might explain some of the sadness that pervades her work -- a mood not conveyed through desperate, gut-wrenching shouts, but rather through subtle, nagging feelings of quiet despair that tug at her acoustic strings and fill in the spaces between her whispers. Listening to Wright sing breathlessly as she strums a guitar or plays somber notes on a piano, there is the distinct sense that she has unwittingly taken the day's, or week's, or even month's feelings and communicated them through everything touched and every word spoken. In the end, her songs don't find their meaning in clusters of words or turns of phrase, but instead in a note that hangs in the air, a key momentarily depressed, a sigh that dissipates into nothing.