Clear, expressive songwriting paired with light-as-air vocals propelled Cosy Sheridan out of the folk coffeehouses of northern New England and onto stages and festivals nationwide. A prior recipient of the “New Folk” award at the Kerrville Folk Festival and the “Troubadour” award at Colorado’s Telluride Festival, she has kept refining her craft as a songwriter after relocating in 1994 to the canyon country surrounding Moab, Utah.
Born in New Hampshire into a musical household, Sheridan trained on classical piano and performed oboe in school ensembles as a child. At nine she first found her own voice by taking up the acoustic guitar and learning contemporary folk material. Though she briefly enrolled at Amherst College and the University of New Hampshire, she left academics to perform in the folk clubs of New Hampshire and Maine. Temporary residence in Boston allowed further sharpening of her technique under the guidance of guitarists Guy Van Duser and Eric Schoenberg.
The decisive breakthroughs arrived in 1992 with major songwriting honors at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas and the Telluride Festival in Colorado. Songs drawn from her initial pair of albums, Quietly Led and Saturn Return, reappeared on the 1996 live release One Sure Thing, captured at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, Clayton Auditorium in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her 1998 album Grand Design explored her adopted Utah surroundings, and Anthymn appeared two years afterward.
