Lily Frost

Singer/songwriter Lily Frost draws on influences of '60s pop, fashion, and art to create her engaging brand of not-easily pigeonholed music. Painfully shy, the introverted Frost spent years expressing herself in her diary entries, gradually setting them to music and putting years of classical piano training to use. By 1989, she was studying jazz and French at Concordia University in Montreal and was performing '20s covers in a local group called the Sheiks. To escape from the Montreal winters, Frost took a job singing on a ship in Cairo, Egypt, performing standards and torch songs seven nights a week, for six months, before returning to Vancouver in 1992 to front the Colorifics, who embraced '50s-style swing and attracted a following along the West Coast. The group scored at college radio when they released one of Frost's compositions, "Soda Pop," but Frost, wanting to pursue more contemporary sounds, released the solo effort Lunamarium, which was re-packaged and re-released when she signed with Nettwerk. Promoting the record, which was well-received by critics, Frost had the opportunity to share the stage with acts that included Coldplay, Cowboy Junkies, and the Dandy Warhols. She also continued to work concurrently with the band Mimosa.