Edith Frost w/ Eric Ziegenhagen
Edith Frost has seven years of record-making & touring under her belt. No Depression called her 1997 Calling Over Time, "the strongest, most distinctive debut since Richard Buckner or Palace." Since then Edith has taken great strides into the far-flung field of pop music, releasing two more critically acclaimed records and an EP on Drag City and headling shows to enthusiastic fans all over the country. After touring on the release of Wonder Wonder, (2001) Edith has continued to write and recently released a free set of tunes called "Demos," which 1000---s of fans are still downloading at www.edithfrost.com.
Playwright, folksinger, humdinger. Eric Ziegenhagen has been performing his spare, offbeat original songs in small clubs, coffeehouses and cabarets since the late 1990s. He is self-releasing his first CD, "You're Talking to the Wrong Guy" in January 2005. The CD was recorded in 2004 in one marathon session by Dan Dietrich (The Redwalls, Head of Femur) at Wall to Wall Recording in Chicago and features Elizabeth Lindau (of Canasta) on violin.
On stage, he's a casual and conversational fellow with opaque songs, treading the warm and weird ground between Jonathan Richman and David Lynch - working in the tradition of hard-to-pin-down individual artists like Leonard Cohen, Robyn Hitchcock, Vic Chestnutt, and Mary Margaret O'Hara (all big influences).
A noted playwright and stage director, Eric was singled out by American Theatre magazine (the Rolling Stone of the theater world) in 1999 as one of 15 up-and-coming U.S. theater artists under 30. Born in Minneapolis in August 1970, he has lived in Chicago since 1997.
Writes songs, plays them on a four-string nylon-string open-tuned guitar slung flat across his lap. The story: Eric's dad owned a guitar when Eric was growing up. Papa Ziegenhagen would let little Eric play the guitar as long as he kept it in the guitar case, and so he learned how to play that way.
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