“Courtney Tidwell could have been beamed to the Luminaire from a bohemian folk bar in 1960s Greenwich Village. Her music, meanwhile, suggest a collation of the sounds she heard on her time-traveling journey. Swirling, yet smudgy, pulsing with coruscations, hers is a moonlit sound, intangible and strange… Tidwell’s voice is the most remarkable instrument here… When she clambers over scales, extends individual syllables across four-note melodies, or abandons words altogether to revel in sounds…. there’s something strikingly individual about her, a mysterious quality all her own.”
—The Guardian UK
TIDWELL comes from a country music background: her mother, Connie Eaton, had a brief brush with fame in the 1970s, and her father, like TIDWELL’s husband (and co-producer) Todd, works in one of Nashville’s prestigious Music Row establishments. Growing up in the heart of Music City she spent her childhood years in her bedroom, avoiding the painful breakup of her parents’ marriage by listening to a wide variety of music, headphones clamped to her ears. Swearing she would never follow the footsteps of her mother, whose brief taste of success also unleashed a series of psychological problems, she eventually succumbed to music’s lure, beginning by booking bands for a local pizza restaurant. She briefly formed a punk rock act with another girlfriend and she eventually fell to making music alone, combining the various country influences around which she’d grown up with the music she’d discovered for herself.