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Artist
The instrument Carrie Ferguson grew up playing was an enormous upright, chocolate-brown (to put it politely) piano inherited from the family of one of her father’s third-grade students. This piano, built from the parts of several old pianos by students in a local instrument building workshop, had a darkly booming, slightly furry quality to it, not unlike the weather outside in her home town of Arcata on the North Coast of California. In order to write good music you had to play the way the instrument itself demanded, which to her ear meant sticking to the lower three quarters of the keyboard, and using plenty of rolling arpeggios and minor chords. Ferguson credits the stubborn and sonorous voice of her childhood piano, combined with the perpetual fog and exhilarating clamminess of coastal Northern California, as instilling in her the baseline aesthetic of melancholic optimism that still permeates her words and music today. Carrie started performing her songs in 1990 and has been going non-stop ever since. From 1998-2005 she was in the Northampton, MA band, Plump. Since then she has continued to perform solo or with her band, The Cherry Street Band. She also plays keyboards in two Western Mass bands, The Ambiguities and the Chris Scanlon Band. Carrie's first full-length solo record, Riding On the Back of The Wind, out in February 2010, is a catchy, exuberant collection of melodic story pop. When she first started making the record in L.A. with her brother, Eric Ferguson, b