Laurie Levine is a prolific South African Folk songwriter who is excited to release her beautiful new album Six Winters through ADA/Warners.

Laurie’s music comes from the “heartspace’, a word coined by poet Breyten Breytenbach to describe South Africa’s anguished beauty

Since surfacing with her remarkable debut Unspoken back in 2007, Laurie has taken her original material and soulful voice to an ever-growing fanbase, earning multiple accolades along the way. Among these was winning ‘Best Producer’ award (producer Dan Roberts) for this critically acclaimed album, Six Winters at the annual South African Music Awards (SAMAs) in 2012. Levine’s second album, Living Room (2009), was also nominated for a SAMA in 2010, with her performances at South Africa’s National Arts Festival in the town of Grahamstown in July 2011 earned Levine a highly coveted Standard Bank Silver Ovation award.

As her fans know well, Levine’s gift lies in her ability to draw on the deep roots of folk music, and mix it in with a myriad of other influences, including sounds from America’s Appalachia region and of course her native South Africa. With the acoustic guitar as her main instrument, her recordings see Levine – and a host of superb musicians – deploy an array of instruments (pedal steel, dobro, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, strings) that add the kind of atmosphere and layers that propel her songs out of simple singer-songwriter territory.

Remarkably, however, Levine manages to locate her contemporary folk stylings with a singularity that only the very best in the genre achieve with ease (Lucinda Williams, Alison Krauss, Anais Mitchell and Emmylou Harris). This has led to critics in South Africa (many of whom have likened her material to Alison Krauss/Robert Plant and Ryans Adams) uniformly praising Levine’s output, with all three of her albums making it onto multiple ‘Best Of’ lists in their respective years.

At the heart of Levine’s material is her storytelling ability. Whether tales of grief, loss, sex, betrayal or first loves, Levine’s ability to open a door with her words, and let listeners into an intimate world populated by a cast of lovers, strays, strangers is immense. This has given rise to a string of fan favourites and music videos for songs like “Kites”, a nostalgic waltz through an early summer love, and “Oh Brother”, a sparse but potent track that could easily be an outtake from Krauss and Plant’s Grammy winning Raising Sand.

As much as her material finds its footing in the terrain of Americana, Levine is also refreshingly unafraid of following where her music leads. Newer songs now making their way into her live sets reveal a sonic moodiness and also a heightened playfulness that are likely to find their way into the studio in future recordings.