Erin McKeown Band

Ten years into a dynamic career marked by 7 LPs, 2 EPs and a live concert album, Erin McKeown delivers Hundreds of Lions, her first collection of original songs since 2005’s We Will Become Like Birds.

Although Erin started writing songs while still in high school in hometown Fredericksburg, Virginia, she really began earning her chops while attending Brown University, releasing two albums before graduation and gigging on weekends whenever and wherever possible. She hasn’t slowed down, famously averaging 200 live shows a year. As a multi-instrumentalist, Erin’s become in demand as a session player, recording vocals, piano, bass lines and of course guitar tracks for other artists’ records all while steadily working material that became Hundreds of Lions.

At the center of the album, the song “The Lions” brims with bright piano, cathedral spire atmosphere and traces of carnival-noir pop as Erin sings, “There’s a risk, there’s a twist, in anything worth doing,” with a voice clear and strong as glass ribbon.

Indeed, the whole Hundreds of Lions project—from the experimental production techniques to the decision to record independently, without label support--is a risk, with a twist that finds Erin collaborating with Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records.

It’s an alliance that has been in the stars a long time, as Erin and Ani’s creative paths have crisscrossed ever since Ani first heard Distillation—the only other album Erin recorded independently--and invited Erin on tour back in 1999. In the decade since, Erin’s built a catalogue and career that influences a whole new set of songwriters in the way Ani’s music first inspired Erin.

Working outside the system has had its challenges—requiring patience, a healthy sense of adventure and a willingness to figure out how to stream a concert from the center of a river--but now Erin’s got the record fit to bookend the first ten years of a dynamic career of a unique American artist.

The dawn of this next decade finds Erin expanding both as a writer—into essays and poetry—and as an activist, lobbying for better energy policy on Capitol Hill and teaching songwriting at girls’ rock camps across the country.

www.erinmckeown.com

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