 Melissa Crabtree
Melissa Crabtree has been living her life as an outdoor guide and musician.
With the wilderness as both her home and her muse, her songs transport
the listener to a world of mammoth cliffs and rushing rivers. Playing
live, Melissa Crabtree delivers heartfelt stories with her distinctively husky
alto and pleasingly twangy guitar-style. She loves playing on the back
porch, and brings the same easy-going, down-home style to the stage.
MelissaCrabtree released her first CD while touring across the country in a
vegetable-oil powered van, to protest our nation’s petroleum
addiction. She also produced a compilation CD of songs and spoken word
about alternatives to fossil fuels which includes Julia Butterfly Hill,
Tony Furtado and Julie Wolf (Ani DiFranco Band).
While performing across the Rocky Mountains and on the West Coast, Melissa
Crabtree has played at the Oregon Country Fair and the Taos Solar Music
Festival. In 2002, she was among the 10 finalists in the songwriter
showcase at both the Rocky Mountain Folksfest in Lyons, Colorado and
the Tucson Free Folk Festival. She has shared the stage with many
leading folk performers including Greg Brown, Ani DiFranco, Michelle
Shocked, John Prine, Patty Larkin, Catie Curtis, and Tony Furtado.
Melissa Crabtree’s debut album "Off the Beaten Path" was released in
the spring of 2002. It was produced with Cookie Marenco and Wally
Ingram, and features Tony Furtado, Darol Anger and a host of other fine
musicians. The title track was inspired by southwestern fringe living,
as experienced by Crabtree and her friends. In the first lines of the
song, we are introduced to a "Dusty, dusty devil, spinnin’
lots of sand" who "kicks up her heels and flies across the land" and by
the end, we recognize that the song is an autobiographical sketch of
the guitar-toting, river-running artist herself: "She’s
swirlin in an eddy, getting caught in the cane, She gets stuck in that
eddy, and swirls around again, She spends her days out on a river raft,
Melissa Crabtree walks off the beaten path."
Visit: www.melissacrabtree.com |
