Her debut 2009 debut album, Take to the Sky, split the difference between Cole Porter and the Cure, and as she continued to record over the course of the 2010s, she started to incorporate original material on her new albums. A native of Houston, Texas, Edmonson began to write songs as a child, and after attending South Carolina’s College of Charleston for a time, she relocated to Austin, Texas to pursue a musical career. After an unsuccessful audition for the second season of American Idol, she hunkered down in Austin and developed her idiosyncratic vocal style. In 2009 she independently released her debut, Take to the Sky, which wound up climbing into the Top 20 of the Billboard jazz charts. Three years later she independently released Way Down Low, which made it to number one on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart in the wake of positive notices on NPR and in The New York Times. After Way Down Low, Edmonson signed to Sony Masterworks, which released The Big Picture in 2014; the album was produced by Mitchell Froom. An appearance as a singer in Woody Allen’s 2016 film Café Society appeared before she started work on her fourth album. Produced by Edmonson, the resulting Old Fashioned Gal was a collection of all originals and appeared in the spring of 2018.

Photo Credit © Robert Ascroft