Liz Tormes

One of the most promising artists performing in New York City right now, Liz Tormes began her music career by accident. After leaving Nashville for NYC, she bizarrely found herself playing rhythm guitar in a dive bar in Alphabet City. Bizarre because she was not a musician, but had been recruited into a weekly gig with an unorthodox string band for her innate sense of mu Not knowing how to finger chords, she stuck a playing card between the neck and the strings of an old junk-store guitar, laying down a raw backbeat. Since then, she has written an impressive body of work and has performed at Joe's Pub, Mercury Lounge, The Knitting Factory, Sin-e, and The Living Room. Growing up in Nashville, Liz spent her time listening to The Smiths and Echo & The Bunnymen while riding to the Grand Ole Opry with Bill Monroe. The combination of those early influences and a musical diet of nothing but murder ballads & old time music while teaching herself to play guitar, appears to have had a lasting impact on Liz Tormes' music and lyrics. While the moody songs on her CD, Limelight, may retain echoes of the stark, honest realism of early roots music, the arrangements and instrumentation move boldly beyond that genre to incorporate quirky keyboard melodies amid washes of sparkly guitar which run beneath her sweetly haunting voice. The result is a dark, acoustic pop record filled with eerily familiar, melancholy songs that seem to wander in the window, as if from a distant radio. Teddy Thompson & Ollabelle's Amy Helm appear as guest vocalists. Early interest from Ken Coomer (of Wilco & Uncle Tupelo fame) resulted in an EP of demos recorded in his Nashville living room, but LIMELIGHT is Liz's first national release.