Cricket Blue

You might think of Simon & Garfunkel when you first hear Cricket Blue, or of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. But their music is equally evocative of literary voices: Alice Munro. Dylan Thomas. Flannery O’Connor. Even a touch of Edward Gorey.

Laura Heaberlin and Taylor Smith are musicians, sure, but they're storytellers too. The eleven songs on their debut album Serotinalia feature a cast of characters right out of a short story collection. A listless grocery store clerk. A woman obsessed with her milkman. A harvest deity who is ritually murdered every fall. Oh, and a pair of scissors.

When the pair first met as members of a Middlebury College a cappella group, both were individually-performing singer-songwriters. After graduation, they each got involved in the folk scene in Burlington, Vermont, often splitting bills. As they worked out more and more duets to add variety to these sets, Heaberlin and Smith accidentally slipped into being a duo. They made it official in the summer of 2013 and formed Cricket Blue.

Two acclaimed EPs resulted, leading to Paste magazine dubbing Cricket Blue one of the "10 Vermont Bands You Should Listen To Now." Vermont's alternative weekly Seven Days called them "indie folk with soul and intellect," naming their last EP one of the year's best albums, and they've played stages and folk festivals around the United States and Canada. But it took Heaberlin and Smith five years to record their first full-length. They write slowly, they say, filling pages of notebooks with ideas about a certain character before gradually condensing it into a song. "If you just write about yourself all the time, you're limited in what you're able to say," says Heaberlin. "So I create a character that comes from an emotionally true space but I’m able to tailor their circumstances to better build the point I’m trying to make."

Fortunately, Cricket Blue's dense, often dark narratives are delivered with some catchy hooks. Listeners have lauded their songs “an astonishing mix of original lyrics and arrangements that rewards the casual listener, as well as those who choose to lean forward and roll them around like great pieces of literature and composition” and an "unlikely combination of the gothic, the literary, and the hummable."