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Amy Correia
Reminiscing about getting her start at New York City's former East Village folk club, Café Sine, Amy Correia says, "It was cool because you didn't need to have a following to play there. People could just walk in off the street, without a plan, and listen."
One gets that same sense of fortuitous discovery when listening to Correia's Carnival Love (Capitol). Utilizing a variety of stringed instruments, including acoustic guitar, mandolin, baritone ukulele, banjo (all of which she plays herself), Correia creates hypnotic, homespun songs that draw from such influences as folk, pop, blues and French-style cabaret. Add to that her mesmerizing voice and a lyrical dexterity akin to Bob Dylan, and Correia is a great find.
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Correia, who grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, says her first love was singing. She remembers singing along to the great variety of music her parents would play around the house. "I can recall all the 8-track tapes that were lying about," she jokes. "We had Johnny Cash, The Partridge Family, Three Dog Night, Dionne Warwick. We listened to quite an interesting mix of music."
It was a back injury in college that led her to start playing her guitar seriously. "I had left school to recuperate and spent two months lying in bed," she says. " I had a guitar and started learning how to play it seriously. It became the tool to allow me to write songs and sing."
As Amy moved from Massachusetts to New York City to her current home of Los Angeles, her songwriting drew from an ever-widening palette of experiences. Naturally, her musical expression followed suit, and she began to seek out other instruments to play. Correia says, "I'm not musically-trained, so I've learned mostly from listening to stuff and plucking around. And I'm not a great instrumentalist, so I use the instruments to accompany myself. What led me to the ukulele and the mandolin was the desire to write different kinds of songs. These instruments have unique flavors, which inspire me to write entirely different kinds of songs."
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