Bethany Yarrow

Singer/songwriter Bethany Yarrow is the daughter of folk-pop legend Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary. A Brooklyn resident, Yarrow's first interest was understandably not music, but film. In fact, in various interviews she has spoken of her long-time rebellion against her own musical heritage. In college she began making documentaries. Yarrow won a fellowship to go to South Africa where she directed the feature-length documentary film, Mama Awethu!. The picture, which depicted the lives on women in the country's townships, was shown nationally on PBS and was entered in various film festivals across the globe. She eventually won prizes at the Sundance, Berlin, Human Rights Watch, and Bombay Film Festivals. After her cinema experience, Yarrow began to come to terms with the rich lineage of folk music that had been a part of her everyday life growing up. Being a political person, she connected both the cultural, political, and historical contexts of many of the songs from the folk music canon, and began to perform them in small clubs and coffeehouses in New York with augmented and original instrumentation. The recorded result was her debut album, Rock Island, issued on the Little Monster label in January of 2004. Produced with help from Kevin Salem (Mercury Rev, Bad Brains) and Knox Chandler (Siouxsie & the Banshees), the album takes hold of many songs from the American and Celtic canons and recontextualizes them using modern production techniques and approaches to songwriting and performance. Unlike the synthetic DJ approaches to folk music, which tend to erase original meaning from songs and blur their original intentions, Yarrow's interpretations as well as her own songs offer shards of instruction and meaning for her own time without demeaning or emptying the source material of its power. Her cinematic approach to recording is a welcome and refreshing. In addition to her own album, Yarrow has also appeared as a backing vocalist on Claudia Acuña's album Luna. The release of Yarrow's next project, a duo recording for voice and cello with Rufus Cappadocia, entitled Born to Roam, was scheduled to be issued later in 2004.