Richard Shindell

Richard Shindell

Friday 22nd March 2024

Waterstones Bookshop Canterbury

Doors 7pm for 7.30pm start

Tickets Full Price £17 Under 25s £8 Door £19

‍

Note re booking - please don't contact the venue (Waterstones) direct about booking tickets. All tickets are sold via Folk in the Barn, the promoter of this event.

‍

Richard Shindell lives as both an immigrant and emigrant, crossing thresholds, that informs his illumination of the human experience through narrative song.  

‍

Shindell has inhabited a Zen Buddhist monastery, busked in the streets of Paris, opened for Joan Baez (who covered several of his songs), and collaborated with Grammy-winner Larry Campbell (Bob Dylan, Levon Helm, Elvis Costello).

‍

Originally from New York, now living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Shindell is a writer whose songs paint pictures, tell stories, juxtapose ideas and images, inhabit characters, vividly evoking entire worlds along the way and expanding our sense of just what it is a song may be. Meticulously recorded over three years in New York and Buenos Aires, his most recent release, Careless, offered an ambitious, luxurious, full-length statement.

‍

Innovative, original and occasionally spiritual, Shindell’s songs weave tales that interchangeably champion the downtrodden, exalt the disaffected or wax empathetic to those lost to society's fringes. From lighthearted ballads and adulterous love songs, to dirges and diatribes that skillfully skewer politics, prejudice, war and religion, to the comic point-of-view of a cow stuck in a barbed wire fence, he has a unique ability to morph into the soul of the many and varied personalities he casts as narrators in certain songs—veritable novellas framed in haunting acoustic melodies.

‍

During the pandemic, Shindell stayed in Argentina, out on the wide open Pampa, reading, writing, taking walks, doing a little experimental recording, and tending the garden. He now returns to the road for a limited number of performances.

‍

If you haven’t heard of his name, you will know his songs. Reunion Hill, You Stay Here, The Next Best Western have all been covered by artists such as Fairport Convention and Show of Hands.

‍

“We are beyond thrilled that he is coming to Folk in the Barn.  Richard has been on my wish list for longer than I can remember.”  - Debs

‍

"Occasionally an artist has a night that makes even skeptics think, “O.K., maybe he is the best.” Richard Shindell achieved this." — Ann Powers, NY Times

‍