Adrienne Young

Artist's Website

Adrienne Young lives in Nashville, but everything about her suggests some other time and place: the teapot in which she brews her organic tea, the sunlight that spills through her windows over stacks of books and rustic jumbles of tapestries and instruments, her quiet passion and intelligence, and above all the sound of her music.

You could not conceive of a less likely strategy for winning pop media attention — still, that’s exactly what Young achieved, from a Grammy nomination (most unusual for a debut indie release) to national radio exposure (via NPR) to numerous “best of” lists, including a “Best Country Single of the Year” citation from the Nashville Scene, third place in the Amazon.com list of “best folk recordings of the year,” and benediction from the Los Angeles Times as “the Americana find of the year.”

A seventh-generation Floridian, raised on the land farmed by her family generations earlier, Young graduated magna cum laude from Belmont University with a Music Business/Spanish degree. Endless and unfulfilling clerical jobs along Music Row motivated this triple-threat singer, writer and multi-instrumentalist to start her own record label, Addiebelle Music. She used her public exposure from the start to laud positive organizations and issues, becoming a champion for sustainable agriculture. In 2004, she became the spokesperson for the Food Routes Network (www.foodroutes.org), which currently has 44 chapters across the United States, actively nurturing Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaigns whose primary aims are to build and strengthen local food systems.

Young plans to donate a portion of each CD sold to the American Community Garden Association (www.communitygarden.org), maintaining her commitment to organic agriculture, direct farmer-to-consumer distribution, and self-reliance. This “seed-fund” will eventually distribute non-GM seeds to community gardens across the USA and Canada, focusing especially on urban and inner-city agriculture.

The themes of Young’s new release, ‘Room To Grow’ are relevant to our time: human potential, self-acceptance, and celebration of all that the world has to offer, but the greatest paradox of this album is that in addressing these ideas Young enlightens herself as well.