Short Bio

Hailed as “an amazing talent” by Maverick, acclaimed fiddler/singer/songwriter Laura Cortese stands as one of the most versatile artists in contemporary roots music. Over the course of a string of widely lauded albums—released both solo and with her band, The Dance Cards—Cortese has performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall to Madison Square Garden, shared stages with artists as diverse as Pete Seeger and Band of Horses, toured with TheMountain Goats, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Aoife O’Donovan, and traveled the world as a musical ambassador on behalf of the State Department, performing and teaching in India, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Estonia, Greece, Ukraine, and Montenegro.

On her latest album, Lucky Water, Cortese explores life a little closer to home, looking at the world with a new perspective since her move from Boston to Ghent, where she married a Belgian musician and gave birth to two children. The collection is intimate and vulnerable, grappling with identity, connection, and belonging in the face of dramatic personal transformation, and the production is adventurous to match, balancing small, spare meditations with rich, intoxicating arrangements that blur the lines between chamber folk, roots rock, and indie pop. The result is a profound work of personal discovery, a beautiful, bittersweet reckoning with growth, change, community, and responsibility from an artist learning what happens when the familiar becomes foreign and the foreign becomes familiar.