Kris Delmhorst was right here in our backyard at the Blue Moon Coffeehouse this last year, but unfortunately we missed her (We hate it when we have to miss a Blue Moon Concert!) and so when we saw that she was going to be at the 2002 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival we had no idea who she was.  We soon learned.  Kris Delmhorst was, along with Chris Smither, probably our favorite "find" at the festival.  Though the festival program tells us she has only been playing the guitar for six years, you would never know it by hearing her.  She writes well and sings beautifully.  She plays a wide range of styles from piano ballads, to fiddle tunes adapted to the guitar, to country, to ...  Well just about anything.

     We bought her album "Five Stories" at Falcon Ridge and we loved it.  It is one of those albums in which a few songs grab you right from the start (like "Cluck Old Hen" and "Yellow Brick Road") but the more you listen the better it sounds and pretty soon you realize that there isn't a weak track on the disc.  It is rarely far away from our CD players and is one of our favorite recent albums.  We got to see her again at the Newport Folk Festival (2002) and she was just as impressive.  She gave performances on the Borders stage and the "Roots" stage and the pictures of her on this page were taken by Wade of Delmhorst right before during and following her performance of "Cluck Old Hen" at the "Roots" stage.  Shortly afterward she had a CD signing and was kind enough to sign our copy of "Five Stories."  She seemed friendly and signed the CD to "Wade and April" and remarked that our names sounded beautiful together.  (Wade was impressed - okay, he is a sucker for a compliment, but it was very nice of her to say!)  Recently we got to catch another show in St. Louis which was a longer set and sounded even better.  She sang a couple of songs from her next album "Songs for a Hurricane."  The new songs sounded great live and sound great on the CD which was released in August of 2003.

     Again, "Five Stories" and "Songs for a Hurricane" are very hard to over-rate and we can't recommend them highly enough.  They are available in all fine record stores and from her website which you can get to by clicking the banner above.  There you can also get her first album "Appetite" (harder to find in stores but also recommended) and "Oddlot" (a short odd assortment of live performances almost impossible to find in stores but also excellent).

Newport at the Roots Stage		Newport at the Roots Stage
Newport at the Roots Stage		Newport at the Roots Stage
With Greg Brown and Lucy Kaplansky at Falcon Ridge