Beth Thornley

Beth Thornley fuses the classic textures of 1970s pop and rock with the sincere delivery associated with Aimee Mann and Beth Orton, resulting in a style marked by her distinctive playful warmth. Born in Alabama and trained with a classical music degree, she arrived in Los Angeles during the final years of the 1990s determined to realize her ambitions in rock music. Amid assorted industry work, she completed and issued her debut self-titled album on the independent Stiff Hips label in 2002. The track “I Will Lie” earned finalist status in the rock category of the 2003 USA Songwriting Competition. Three years afterward she issued the assured, stylistically varied My Glass Eye. During the same period her compositions appeared in episodes of Beautiful People, Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, and Scrubs, as well as on the soundtracks for The Perfect Man and Between.

Her third studio album, the shifting Wash U Clean, followed in 2010. Two years after that the favorably received stage musical Bad Apples, which she developed with her regular collaborator Rob Cairns, opened at the Circle X Theatre in Los Angeles. She put out the EP Septagon in 2014; it included “Last to Fall,” a composition she created with Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket that later surfaced on the band’s mid-2015 EP Architect of the Ruin, performed by Phillips himself. Later in 2015 she released her own Americana-leaning EP All That Longing. Licensing of her recordings for visual media persisted, encompassing Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, Girl in Progress, NBC’s Friday Night Lights, and USA Network’s Royal Pains.