Lucy Kaplansky

When Lucy Kaplansky was 18 years old, she shocked her neighbors in the Hyde Park area near the University of Chicago when, instead of going to college, she went to New York City with her boyfriend to become a folk singer. There she found a fertile community of songwriters and performers – Suzanne Vega, Steve Forbert and The Roches. With a beautiful flair for harmony, Kaplansky was everyone’s favorite singing partner. Fifteen years later, having become a clinical psychologist as well as a sought-after duet and harmony singer, she made another surprising decision: she gave up her private practice and her position at a New York hospital to pursue a full-time singing career.

Lucy Kaplansky is an acclaimed singer-songwriter of rare talent, “a truly gifted performer with a bag full of enchanting songs” (The New Yorker) and “the troubadour laureate of modern city folk” (The Boston Globe). She has released eight critically acclaimed CDs, two of which were awarded Best Pop Album of the year by the Association for Independent Music. National Public Radio described her 2012 album Reunion as “a master class in making the personal universal,” and her most recent album Everyday Street has been dubbed “spare and luminous” and “remarkable.” Kaplansky was part of folk supergroup Cry Cry Cry with Dar Williams and Richard Shindell (which The New Yorker called “a collection of lovely harmonizing and pure emotion”). Their album was an astonishing success, resulting in a national tour of sold-out concerts, as well as a national sold-out reunion tour in 2018. Her recording of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” has over 12 million streams on Spotify, and she has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and Morning Edition as well as BBC Radio, and CBS Sunday Morning, and has sung harmony on albums by Suzanne Vega, Bryan Ferry, Nanci Griffith and Shawn Colvin. Her song “Guilty as Sin” was featured in the NBC television show Ed, and her vocals were featured in the Tom Cruise film The Firm.

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