Biography
Growing up amid an Irish household, Carol Noonan absorbed traditional British music from an early age. Local audiences first embraced her through the Boston-based group Knots and Crosses. Local radio exposure helped drive strong sales for the band’s debut release, Creatures of Habit. Their follow-up, Curve of the Earth, brought Noonan the Outstanding Female Vocalist honor at the Boston Music Awards. After parting ways with the group, she turned her attention to a solo path. Ben Wittman produced her first solo album, Absolution, issued in 1995 and featuring Duke Levine on guitars and mandolin, Kevin Barry on acoustic guitar, Paul Bryan on bass, and Tom West on Hammond organ. Noonan Building and Wrecking appeared in 1996, followed a year later by Only Witness. That final record fulfilled her three-album contract with Philo Records, prompting her withdrawal from the music industry and a move to Brownfield, Maine, where she settled with her husband, a maker of fishing nets. When commercial fishing declined and his work diminished, she resumed recording, but independently, launching the site www.carolnooonan.com and handling her own releases. The first of these was the self-titled 1999 album. Big Iron, released in 2001, offered a departure as a set of covers centered on the Old West. Christmas followed in 2003. Another covers collection, Somebody’s Darling: Songs of War, Loss and Remembrance, arrived in 2004 and drew inspiration from the U.S. invasion of Iraq without addressing it directly. The brief 2005 duo project The Water Is Wide, recorded with pianist Dana Cunningham, served as a benefit for an arts center she planned to construct on her own land. Once the Stone Mountain Arts Center opened, she performed there, including 2007 shows that were filmed for her debut DVD, Live at the Stone Mountain Arts Center, which appeared in 2008 alongside the CD As Tears Go By, a compilation of 1960s covers.
Albums