Heidi Talbot: Sing It For A Lifetime

Born in County Kildare, Ireland, Talbot was entranced by her mother’s Crystal Gayle and Patsy Cline records. She moved to the US as a teenager and began her performing career in the bars of New York, with a five-year stint as part of the American supergroup Cherish The Ladies.

Heidi is a warm and engaging performer and over the past twenty years has performed all over North and South America, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, in the finest Concert Halls and International Festivals. She is equally at home in front of a Symphony Orchestra, a Performing Arts Centre, a Folk Festival or even at the White House.

Heidi has been nominated for Folk singer of the year and Best Traditional Song by BBC Radio 2, Best Live Act by the Scottish Traditional Music Awards and Best Female Vocalist at The Irish Music Awards. She has shared the stage and recorded with Mark Knopfler, Graham Coxon (Blur), Eddi Reader, Idlewild, Matt Rollings, Swedish super group Väsen, Dervish, King Creosote, Tim O’Brien and Jerry Douglas.

Sing It For A Lifetime was forged in a pressure cooker: it was recorded in one sound-proofed room in a house that was being sold, as Heidi Talbot looked after her two daughters and negotiated the split from her husband of 11 years, the folk musician John McCusker. A planned recording stint in Louisiana, cancelled because of Covid, turned into a remote real-time session over two different time zones, 3000 miles apart. An international group of musicians including her friend Mark Knopfler somehow came together so smoothly, you can’t hear the seams. The result is a crowning achievement in her 20-year career. It shows a UK folk veteran going transatlantic, an unconscious return to her earliest years as a performer. But most importantly, it features her most raw and open-hearted work to date, as she finds a new voice away from the long-standing recording partnership with McCusker, who produced her records.

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