Rodney Crowell

With more than 40 years of American roots music under his belt, Texas native RODNEY CROWELL is a two-time Grammy Award winner who has written fifteen #1 hits with five Number One hits of his own and a legacy of songwriting excellence which has made him an icon among giants. With strong roots in country music, Crowell has written chart-topping hits for the likes of Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Keith Urban and more. But owing to the distinctly universal, literary quality of his writing, has also penned beloved songs for artists as diverse as Bob Seger, Etta James, the Grateful Dead, John Denver, Jimmy Buffett and countless others. A member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Crowell is also the author of the acclaimed memoir, Chinaberry Sidewalks, and teamed up with New York Times best-selling author Mary Karr for Kin: Songs by Mary Karr & Rodney Crowell in 2012, with Karr saying of her collaborator, “Like Hank Williams or Townes Van Zandt or Miss Lucinda, he writes and croons with a poet’s economy and a well digger’s deep heart.” Crowell was honored with ASCAP’s prestigious Founder’s Award in 2017, and that same year released the album Close Ties, which spawned another Grammy nomination for “It Ain’t Over Yet” with Rosanne Cash and John Paul White in the category of Best Americana Song. In 2018, he opened his own record label, RC1 Records, and released Acoustic Classics in 2018 and TEXAS in 2019. Also in 2019, Crowell received the Academy of Country Music’s Poet’s Award. His latest album, Triage, was released last July to much critical acclaim.

Rosanne Cash

One of the country’s pre-eminent singer-songwriters, Rosanne Cash has released 15 albums of extraordinary songs that have earned four Grammy Awards and 12 additional nominations.

Cash is also an author whose four books include the best-selling memoir Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.” Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Oxford American, The Nation, and many more print and online publications. Her most recent book, Bird on a Blade (2018), was published by University OF Texas Press, combining images by acclaimed artist Dan Rizzie with Cash’s lyrics.

In addition to regular touring, Cash has partnered in programming collaborations with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Library of Congress. She is currently artist-in-residence at New York University. In 2017–2018, she was a resident artistic director at SFJAZZ and will continue her partnership with them in 2022/23. Along with many other honors and awards, Cash received the 2021 Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded since 1960 to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture. She is the first woman composer to receive this prestigious honor.

‘I consider artists to be in the service industry; the premier service industry for the heart and soul. I am curious to a pathological degree and the Sword of Time hangs over me, and those two things— curiosity and the hourglass— make me feel more urgent than ever to connect, to find community, and to create. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks, it only matters that what is unsaid and what is unseen is given form and has a voice.’

John Leventhal

John Leventhal is a six time Grammy Award-winning musician, producer, songwriter, and recording engineer who has produced albums for William Bell, The Blind Boys Of Alabama, Michelle Branch, Rosanne Cash, Marc Cohn, Shawn Colvin, Sarah Jarosz, Jim Lauderdale, Joan Osborne, Loudon Wainwright, and many others.

In 1988 he produced and co-wrote Shawn Colvin’s Grammy winning debut album Steady On. He arranged and played multiple instruments on Marc Cohn’s 1991 hit Walking In Memphis. In 1998 he won Grammy Awards for both Record and Song Of The Year for producing and co-writing the song “Sunny Came Home” (a 1997 hit for Colvin).

Leventhal produced and co-wrote Rosanne Cash’s 2014 release, The River And The Thread. The River And The Thread won 3 Grammy awards: Americana Album Of The Year, Best American Roots Song and Best American Roots Performance for A Feather’s Not A Bird.

He produced and co-wrote soul singer William Bell’s 2016 Stax Records release This Is Where I Live which went on to win the 2017 Grammy for Americana Album Of The Year. In 2018 Leventhal produced and wrote the song Let My Mother Live for the gospel group The Blind Boys Of Alabama. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best American Roots Performance. The song Crossing To Jerusalem written with Rosanne Cash was nominated for Best American Roots song for the 2019 Grammys.

Sarah Jarosz’s album World On The Ground, produced, arranged and recorded by Leventhal, won the 2021 Grammy for Best Americana Album.

Albums Leventhal has produced or written songs for have been nominated for a total of 19 Grammy Awards.

As a musician he has recorded and/or performed with the above artists as well as Jackson Browne, Willie Nelson, Bruce Hornsby, Elvis Costello, Kris Kristofferson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Charlie Haden, David Crosby, Levon Helm, Edie Brikell, Donald Fagen, Ry Cooder, The Tedeschi Trucks Band, Dr John, Johnny Cash and numerous others.

As a songwriter he has had over 200 songs recorded by various artists, including Rosanne Cash, Shawn Colvin, Marc Cohn, Michelle Branch,The Tedeschi Trucks Band, Vince Gill, George Strait, Jim Lauderdale, Joe Cocker, The Blind Boys Of Alabama, Elvis Costello, and William Bell.

In September 2015 Leventhal received the Americana Music Association award for Instrumentalist Of The Year.

Leventhal has also composed scores to the films Winter’s Solstice (2004), and Big Stone Gap (2014).

John Leventhal’s songs are represented by Downtown Music Publishing.

He lives in New York City.

Patty Griffin

Patty Griffin is among the most consequential singer-songwriters of her generation, a quintessentially American artist whose wide-ranging canon incisively explores the intimate moments and universal emotions that bind us together.

Over the course of two decades, the 2x GRAMMY® Award winner – and 7x nominee – has crafted a remarkable body of work in progress that prompted the New York Times to hail her for “[writing] cameo-carved songs that create complete emotional portraits of specific people…[her] songs have independent lives that continue in your head when the music ends.” 2019 saw the acclaimed release of the renowned artist’s GRAMMY® Award-winning 10th studio recording, PATTY GRIFFIN, available now via her own PGM Recordings label via Thirty Tigers HERE. One of the most deeply personal recordings of Griffin’s remarkable two-decade career and first-ever eponymous LP, PATTY GRIFFIN made a top 5 debut on Billboard’s “Independent Albums” chart amidst unprecedented worldwide acclaim, and later, a prestigious GRAMMY® Award for “Best Folk Album.”

In addition to her creative career, Griffin has also devoted considerable energy and focus towards the wellbeing of the planet as well as showing compassion for the less fortunate among us via personal and public acts of charity. Having crafted a rich catalog that chronicles love and death, heartache and joy, connection and detachment, Patty Griffin continues to push her art forward, as always imbuing every effort with compassion and craft, uncanny perception, and ever-increasing ingenuity.

Neko Case

Is there another songwriter so fearless and inventive? Bending decades of pop music into new shapes, Neko Casewields her voice like a kiss and her metaphors like a baseball bat. She has cast the fishing net of her career wide—from Seattle and Vancouver to Chicago and Stockholm, setting up her home base on a farm inNew England.

Gathering power year after year, Neko sings with the fierce abandon of a newborn infant crying in a basket in the woods. Since escaping the labels of country and Americana, the gorgeous train-whistle vocals of her early career sit submerged in her later style, where their ghost can appear any minute. When her voice jumps an octave, it’s almost visible, like sparks at night. “I never knew where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do with my voice,” she says, “but I just wanted to do it so bad.”

With a career spanning over twenty years, she has famously collaborated with The New Pornographers and Case/Lang/Veirs in addition to releasing many critically acclaimed solo albums, including ‘FoxConfessor Brings The Flood’, ‘Middle Cyclone’ and most recently 2018’s ‘Hell-On’.

She’s doing it on her own terms, but the legacy she’s building is one that can stand up to music made by any other solo artist in her lifetime. Don’t look away; you never know what might happen. “I’m just trying,” she says, “to be myself as hard as I can.”

David Baerwald

Songwriter/composer David Baerwald began as a teenaged bassist in the fabled late-70s Los Angeles punk rock band the Spastics, dubbed the ‘Worst Band in the History of Los
Angeles’ by DIY Magazine. After this unpromising start, he formed the seminal electro-folk duo David+David in 1984 with David Ricketts and released the platinum-selling Boomtown. In 1991 he and producer Bill Bottrell founded the Tuesday Music Club, resulting in Sheryl Crow’s wildly successful debut.

In the intervening years, Baerwald has worked as writer/musician/producer with a wide variety of singers and artists, from opera star Luciano Pavarotti and Japanese classical music heroes the Yoshida Brothers, to country stars Waylon Jennings and Leann Rimes to film-score guru Hans Zimmer, jazz stars like Madeleine Peyroux and Melody Gardot, rock legends like Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, and many others, and his songs can be found on over 35 million albums sold.

He retired from music in 2017 to pursue a career as a novelist. In 2021 he was nominated for a group Tony Award for his theme song from 2002’s smash film Moulin Rouge, now a hit on Broadway. He does not recommend the music business for sane people.

Tony Brown

Tony Brown’s reputation as an unshakeable pillar of the country music scene extends back over 40 years. Working primarily as a producer for some of the biggest names in the business, including Reba McEntire, Vince Gill and George Strait, he is still one of the most sought-after and highly acclaimed producers making the circuit. His most recent collaboration was on Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways.

Often credited as the founding father of the Americana country movement, Tony’s power for bending genres, establishing careers and tirelessly pushing the envelope has earned him numerous awards and recognitions. He is a Grammy Award winner and has also won numerous Academy of Country Music Awards’. His other accolades include ACM Producer of the Year Award, numerous Gold, Platinum and multi-Platinum album credits, and a Grammy nomination for Producer of the Year.

Over the course of his career, he has yielded over 100 #1 singles and record levels of sales exceeding the $100 million mark, while simultaneously building a pantheon of stars unparalleled in music history. Some of the artists he has signed include Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Lyle Lovett, Kelly Willis, Todd Snider, Allison Moorer, The Mavericks, Shooter Jennings and more.

He produced the majority of tracks for Tuskegee, one of 2012’s highest grossing albums, with award-winning artist Lionel Richie featuring duets with Blake Shelton, Jason Aldean, Darius Rucker, Tim McGraw, Jimmy Buffett, Little Big Town, Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson.

Tony served as president of MCA Nashville for nearly two decades before departing to co-found Universal South Records, a joint venture with Universal Records and Tim DuBois. Currently, Tony can be found at the musical helm Tony Brown Enterprises.

Paul Worley

Joe Henry

Joe Henry is a songwriter’s songwriter who is an eclectic tunesmith, who has written cuts, which span rock, folk, country, jazz and soul. Henry, who is an in-demand producer, has refined a number of artist’s projects. Aimee Mann, the late Solomon Burke and John Doe are some of the musicians, who have hired Henry to produce.

Beth Nielsen Chapman

Beth Nielsen Chapman is a really skilled songwriter; she’s taught her own songwriting workshops. She’s very hands-on. Beth has a lot of experience in the teaching aspect, in as much as creativity and songwriting can really be taught. It’s more like a form of encouragement and a form of enlightenment; Beth is particularly good at that.

Beth Nielsen Chapman has taught worldwide in many venues, including the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, and Berklee College of Music. In October 2016, she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriting Hall of Fame

A Nashville-based artist and successful Grammy-nominated songwriter with many hits and 14 solo albums, Beth Nielsen Chapman has always been passionate about teaching. Her creative expression has navigated deep life-changing experiences including the loss of her husband to cancer in 1994, her own bout with breast cancer in 2000, and a brain tumor in 2009. Coming through all this she would say that she ‘wrote her way through it’ and that creativity was her superpower.

Beth has a unique and inspiring teaching style that springs from her thirty years of experiences dancing with the creative flow. She has collected and designed many ways to teach others how to open up to this place within where the possibility and the power of creative spirit begin. Instead of using our energy trying to get rid of fear, doubt, inertia, and all the cast of characters putting those voices in our heads, Beth’s method instead invites them along for the ride, accepting that we can’t be free of them but we can sure pour them a cup of tea and give them a magazine and go ahead and write that song in the midst!

Hearing Beth talk about the creative process, growing and healing through life with art, learning to trust the path of “not knowing” and connecting to the limitlessness of intuition is an inspiration to those who want to open up fully into their most creative self.

“Anytime we create from that deep place of connection in the truth of our experience, it has the potential to resonate far beyond the time of its creation in the same way that all great art transcends generations. No one is born without the ability to do this. That I believe with all my heart.”

Matraca Berg

Matraca Berg made the biggest decision of her life while she was still a kid. The 2008 Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee was a high-school student in Music City when she decided to devote her life to writing songs and singing. “I knew I wasn’t going to college, so I just decided to get going on this as soon as I could,” she recalls. “I just knew I had to get out there and DO it. And I knew that this was the only thing I wanted to do – there was never any question in my mind.’

The fact that only a minuscule number of songwriters actually get to practice their craft successfully didn’t faze her: “I think it was just youthful exuberance and fearlessness,” she says of her decision. The result of that choice was that Matraca Berg had her first No. 1 record as a songwriter at age 18. That first hit was “Faking Love,” as sung by I.G Sheppard and Karen Brooks. In the years since Berg’s songs have practically become the soundtrack of contemporary Nashville. Reba McEntire’s “The Last One to Know” (1987), Patty Loveless’ “I’m That Kind of Girl” (1991), Trisha Yearwood’s “Wrong Side of Memphis” (1992), Martina McBride’s “Wild Angels ” (1996), the Dixie Chicks’ “If I Fall You’re Going Down With Me” (2001), Kenny Chesney’s You And Tequila” and more than 100 other recordings of her songs make her one of the most recorded composers in Music City.

Matraca Berg’s songs have been sung by Randy Travis, Faith Hill, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Linda Ronstadt, Tanya Tucker, Pam Tillis, Keith Urban, Dusty Springfield, Clint Black, Loretta Lynn, and dozens of others. Her cowritten “Strawberry Wine,” as performed by Deana Carter, was named the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year and NSAI Song of the Year in 1997. The two-time Grammy nominee has earned a dozen BMI songwriter awards.

Lera Lynn

With her album On My Own, Lera Lynn has emerged not only with a clear vision of herself, but with an entirely self-propelled breakthrough: Lynn wrote, sang, produced and recorded On My Own alone. She also played every single instrument on the record. It is a magnificent album, haunting and wild. It is also a record that no one else could make, because no one else is Lera Lynn. “I think there is something special about a singular vision,” Lynn says. “That’s not to say there’s not something special about a shared vision, a collaborative vision. But I would be so thrilled to hear records made in isolation by my favorite artists, just to know what their uninfluenced vision of their music is.” She pauses, then adds, “I guess I just wanted to hear what my own imagination sounded like.” 
 Lynn has earned a loyal following, critical acclaim and the admiration of peers and heroes. She first came to international attention through her writing and performances on HBO’s True Detective. Throughout her career, nearly a decade-long run filled with four album releases and hundreds of shows on both sides of the Atlantic, Lynn has maintained her fierce independence and dedication to her fans. Her latest release “Free Again” (from SEGA’s Endless Dungeon to be released 2023) is out now. Lera also recently composed and produced the theme song for The Mantawauk Caves, a fiction podcast for Blumhouse TV, iHeartRadio, and Psychopia Pictures. She is currently on a national tour with Penny and Sparrow in advance of her new record to be released in July.

Mike Reid

Born and raised in Altoona, Pennsylvania, United States, Reid attended college at and graduated from the Pennsylvania State University, where he played defensive lineman for the Penn State Nittany Lions football team. He then spent five seasons with the Cincinnati Bengals in the National Football League, earning trips to the Pro Bowl after the 1972 and 1973 seasons, before retiring after the 1974 season. He subsequently focused on his musical career, co-writing several hit singles for country music artists, including Ronnie Milsap‘s “Stranger in My House“, which won a Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 1984. Reid later began a solo recording career, releasing two studio albums for Columbia Records. He charted seven singles on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks (now Hot Country Songs) chart as a singer, including the number one hit “Walk on Faith“.