Clara Lofaro

The Canadian-born singer/songwriter Clara Lofaro is an eclectic performer whose music embraces pop, rock, R&B, jazz, and any number of stops in between. Born and raised in Toronto, Lofaro took up music at the age of 12, and soon displayed a prodigious talent as a singer and keyboard player. Eager to hone her skills, Lofaro was accepted at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music. While at Lofaro was at Berklee, her music came to the attention of Barry Marshall, a teacher at the college who had worked with R&B legend LaVern Baker and Boston rock stars Peter Wolf and Aimee Mann; Marshall encouraged Lofaro to record her songs, and served as producer for the sessions that would become her first album, 2002's Night Light. Lofaro started her own record label, Come True Records, to release the album, and began dividing her time between Toronto, Boston, and New York as she developed loyal audiences on both sides of the border. Lofaro took over as producer for her second album, 2005's Black + Blue Pearl, and the album picked up radio airplay on New York's WLIR and college stations throughout the Northeast, while 106 VIC radio in Ithaca, NY, named Lofaro's tune "One True Thing" the Song of the Year for 2006. In the fall of 2006, Lofaro and her band took part in Toronto's Indie Week, a competition to find the city's best unsigned talent, and walked off with top honors, beating out over 300 other acts to win a distribution deal with the Canadian branch of Universal Music.