Album Notes

Santa Barbara's hammer-swinging singer/songwriter Noelle Price is back with another album of songs built from the ground up - idiosyncratic, hand-crafted and presented without embellishment. Hanging one-armed off a scaffold of pragmatic guitar work, Noelle uses every lyrical tool she can get her other hand on to cobble together an unlikely array of materials as diverse as diving equipment, pool cues, and recalcitrant old cars to construct this personal monument to life, love, liberty, and the pursuit of frozen confections.

"Backlit", the fourth of Noelle's publicly available albums (excluding such gems as "6-pak of Dr. Pepper" a 1991 collection of songs recorded on a precariously balanced boombox by the teenaged folksinger as a Christmas present to her brother) is set to be released in April of 2005, providing the impetus for her return to interstate touring on the heels of two years of largely staying put for a change. The minimalist production ethos of "Backlit" lends itself very well to this thematically intimate catalog of songs inspired by the joys, challenges, humor, and just plain oddities of everyday life.

Throughout her musical adventures, Noelle has garnered attention for her ability to express experiential and emotional truth through her intricately crafted lyrics, and her willingness to go far afield in her search for just the right snapshot to transport the hearer to the spot on the map where a song's spur trail takes off, without promising to know where it leads. Perhaps owing to a background heavily influenced by theoretical mathematics and time spent with paranoid schizophrenics, Noelle has a unique ability to catch the listener off-guard on a first hearing of her songs, and to begin to make an odd but insightful kind of sense by the second.

"Noelle's writing is superb enjoyment."
Caroline Aiken, Singer/Songwriter

"... as she performed in our cramped little studio
I was struck with her warmth, wisdom, wit and whimsy. All of these
qualities are evident in abundance on her new album, Backlit."
Ed Lehmann, WMNF folk music programmer