- Al Kniola, Host, The Back Porch, 88.1 WVPE Public Radio
John's Bio
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Allison Downey A natural on stage, Award-winning Singer-Songwriter, Allison Downey can make an audience in a 500-seat theatre feel like they’re in her living room. Her face literally lights up as she sings with a voice reminiscent of the stylistic range and quality of Natalie Merchant. “Dynamic, energetic, intimate, masterful, genuine, honest, humorous, hilarious, charismatic” – just a few of the descriptors chosen by critics and audiences to describe Allison’s performances. She takes her audiences on a journey that spans the gamut of human emotions, guiding them through the nuances of connections, and missed connections, across the character of landscapes and seascapes, to the bawdiness of an American in Paris, or a Spaniard in America. In song and performance Allison creates multi-dimensional characters in settings so rich with imagery that they reveal her training (MFA, Theatre) and experience as a theatre artist. Christian Czerwinski of the Lansing NOISE explains “Allison Downey, … the singer with a honey-coated voice is also a playwright and writes songs that appeal to all of the senses. It’s as if she’s creating a scene on stage…” |
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“Allison and John are the complete package…skilled musicians, engaging storytellers, and songs ranging from thoughtful to flat out hilarious…our audience loved them.” -Andy Baker, Northwind House Concerts |
| Born in Berlin, Germany, raised in Washington, DC, Allison is a world traveler, well, 5 continents that is, living for extended periods in Spain, France, Brazil, Senegal, Africa; Tortola, British Virgin Islands; as well as Maine, New Mexico, Texas, Ohio, Washington, and Michigan. She spent much of the past 20 years traipsing across all 50 United States, Canada, England, Mexico, Western Europe, Australia & New Zealand (w/17 twelve year olds), and Eastern Europe before the crumbling of the iron curtain. She’s climbed the Grand Teton, the tallest mountain in Wyoming, lived in a tent near the Yukon on a glacier lake, lived in an New Mexican adobe house heated only by the firewood she chopped, snorkled the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, herded sheep and cattle & picked potatoes while living above the pigs in an 1100 year old stone house in Galicia province, Spain. |
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“Real and earnest songwriting, with a sense of humor about itself.” - Ryan Cunningham, “Recoil Magazine” “Downey's smooth, lyrical, soaring voice is a splendid instrument.” - Mark Bretz, KDHX radio, St. Louis |
| Allison absorbs the sounds, scents, textures, landscapes, and seascapes of the places she visits. These experiences seep into the songs she writes as portraits, snapshots or vignettes as if she’s creating a scene on stage. She is able to traverse landscapes of loss, discover humor in the mundane, find poignancy in simple exchanges, and reveal the universality of human nature within the disparities of life. Across the Sea, her latest recording, takes the listener to the streets of a homeless person, a middle school dance, fantasies of Ireland, the dusty earth of Texas, the landscape of a lost lover, an English pub at last call, the backyard filled with the critters, and through the gamut of life’s emotions. The songs embody an organic and folksy sound while borrowing from Folk-pop to Texas twang, Bluegrass to sultry Jazz, and from folk guitar ballads to ethereal, contemporary piano duets. The themes of distance and longing for love out of reach thread through most of the songs without taking on a melancholy tone, due in large part to the lightness and humor of Allison’s stories and performances. Allison artfully brings the characters in the stories to life. She even transforms into her alter-egos when audience favorites “Carmen” or “Melba” take the stage to offer their version of a song, a harkening to her advanced training in theatre. |