Cordy Lavery

Austin, TX-based singer, songwriter and guitarist Cordy Lavery has been performing music almost all her life, and that depth of artistic and personal experience can be heard on her long-awaited debut solo album Cordless. A winner of the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Competition – an honor she shares with such esteemed songwriters as Robert Earl Keen, Jr., Tish Hinojosa (alongside Cordy in 1979), James McMurtry, Darden Smith, John Gorka and Tom Russell, among others – she has also played in rock bands since her teens, most recently in the Austin outfits His Boy Elroy, The Fontanelles, The Keytones and currently Utley3. An East Coast native who grew up on the Jersey shore and in rural Connecticut, Cordy taught herself guitar at age 10 and has since become accomplished on acoustic and electric six- and 12-string. She began playing in bands at 13 and in her teens Cordy opened for Vassar Clements, Earl Scruggs, NRBQ and Ricky Scaggs. Infamously suspended from high school for singing Ray Wylie Hubbard's "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother" in the talent show, she moved to Texas the day after she graduated, and has been a regular presence on the Austin music scene ever since. As the Austin Chronicle notes, "Singer and guitarist Cordy Lavery shows off a rich, bruised, all-in vibrato and some solid spank-and-twang axe work." Her singer-songwriter gifts are charmingly showcased on Cordless, which boasts a warm and alluring chamber-folk ambience with touches of country and other roots flavors (and features rising Americana star Brennen Leigh on mandolin and harmony vocals and a song by acclaimed Austin songstress Betty Elders ("Long Bed From Kenya"). Its lyrics are rich with candor and poignancy and run the emotional gamut from heartbreak to romance, vulnerability, longing, friendship, reflection, desire, love and more, capped by the classic pop-style closer, "Eartha Kitty," that fondly salutes a beloved pet. It's a collection of moments that truly matter for the times when deep feelings are the best possible elixir.

Austin, TX