Richard Shindell

Richard Shindell is a writer whose songs paint pictures, tell stories, juxtapose ideas and images, and inhabit characters, vividly evoking entire worlds along the way and expanding our sense of just what it is a song may be.

From his first record, Sparrow’s Point (1992), to his current release, Careless (2016), Shindell has explored the possibilities offered by this most elastic and variable of cultural confections: the song. The path that led him to songwriting was both circuitous and direct.

Taking up the guitar at the age of eight, he listened but imagined that composing a song was out of the question. After college and a nine-month stint in a Zen Buddhist community in upstate New York, he headed to Europe with his guitar, finding something not approaching a livelihood performing in the Paris Metro, where he discovered, “I loved the acoustics in those tunnels, but only when they were empty.”

About Naked Soul

Naked Soul presents performances from some of the country’s top singer/songwriters without microphones or amplifiers, as if the music were, acoustically speaking, naked. The musicians in the series draw upon the universal themes inherent in Himalayan art—spirituality, peace, tolerance, wisdom, compassion—on select Friday evenings

Image Credit

Photograph by Alejandro Baccarat