Cindy Lee Berryhill


Cindy Lee Berryhill is an American singer-songwriter.

Biography

Berryhill grew up in various parts of California. Her debut album Who's Gonna Save The World? came out in October 1987 and was followed by the Lenny Kaye produced, Naked Movie Star in 1989. In Allmusic's online Cindy Lee Berryhill Biography entry, Richie Unterberger wrote, "The San Diegan's 1987 debut, Who's Gonna Save the World?, may be her best simply because it is her most straightforward. Then as now, she was most effective, ironically, at her most basic and serious." By contrast, Stewart Mason in his four and a half star review of her third album, calls it her "first completely solid and intriguing effort".
Berryhill, like Brenda Kahn, Paleface, Beck, Michelle Shocked and John S. Hall were early proponents of the New York City Anti-folk movement. She is featured in the documentary Mariposa: Under a Stormy Sky along with Emmylou Harris, The Violent Femmes, Daniel Lanois and others.
It would be another six years before her third album Garage Orchestra would be released. Garage Orchestra was a tin-can-pop inflected departure from her earlier folkier albums and garnered a 4 star review in Rolling Stone. In 1995 her boyfriend and husband-to-be, rock writer Paul Williams suffered a brain injury and Berryhill put off the making of her next album until 1996's Straight Outta Marysville.
In 1999, Berryhill's novel, Memoirs of A Female Messiah was released along with a live album entitled Living Room 16. After the birth of Berryhill and Williams's son in 2001, she began a song cycle that included the song "Beloved Stranger", that was inspired by her experiences with her husband's brain injury and the awareness that many soldiers were coming home from war with similar injuries. In 2008, the album Beloved Stranger was released.
Berryhill's second cousin was the surfboard shaper Dale Velzy and her first cousin is Damon Berryhill who was a major league baseball player and now works for the Braves.
Berryhill currently lives in Encinitas, California with her son, Alexander Berryhill-Williams. Her late husband, Paul Williams, who died on March 27, 2013, from the early onset of dementia, due to a brain injury sustained in a 1995 bicycle accident, lived in a nearby nursing home.
Her seventh album, The Adventurist was released on March 10, 2017, on Omnivore Records.

Partial discography

All US releases unless otherwise noted.

Albums