In the spring of 2008 she will release a brand new collection of her most innovative and yet accessible material to date. Working with long time collaborator, the nationally acclaimed producer Rob Genadek, Courtney has distilled her collection of new songs down to eleven luminous tracks.

All of Courtney’s recordings are available on cdbaby

Courtney’s background in her own words:

I grew up in Chicago in the sixties, daughter of a mafia style inner city Italian father and a Swedish ice princess mother. I sang my first solo at eight in the church balcony on Christmas eve with a white robe and a battery candle..away in a manger. My mother said she couldn’t understand why she had a show off for a daughter when no one else in the family was a musician. I performed my first original song on guitar at that same Lutheran church at twelve and my parents just shook their heads. They didn’t even go to church except on Christmas and Easter but I was obsessed with the choir and the music and the organ...everything...the sheer mysticism of the stained glass windows.

In 1977 my father was indicted by the SEC for insider trading and disappeared. My mom flipped out, my big brother was already out of the house reading Sartre and traveling around France working in vineyards and trying to write a truly great story about our family’s nightmare of the American dream. (He had studied French Lit and Philosophy at Carleton College.) The bank liquidated my father’s assets to pay back investors and came to put price tags on everything in our house. I stole one of my dad’s Jaguars before the bank got it and drove twelve hours due north, destination Lake Vermilion. I was sixteen.

While my mom stood in the driveway of our family home and cried as our own neighbors walked out of our house with everything we owned (the bank even sold my toys and my clothes out of my closet), I landed at my grandfather’s cabin.

My grandfather had died and the property was my mom’s inheritance, not marital property, so the bank couldn’t get at it. I spent my senior year there, with frozen pipes and a wood-stove, skied out every morning to where the road plow quit, to meet the school bus. I graduated with eighteen other fine young scholars from Tower School; half the kids were from the reservation and the other half were the iron ore miners’ kids.

The principal of that school, who’s name I wish I could remember, called me into his office around the time of my eighteenth birthday and said, "Look, I know you’ve been lying and your parents are not out there with you. But you’re a fine student with excellent transcripts. You need to go to college." By this time I had learned a bunch of Dylan songs and had written a few more of my own and was playing around to make money. I was an unusual act, a seventeen year old girl from Chicago playing Dylan in Dylan territory in the late seventies. I used to say, at the time, that when you were up on stage in an Iron Range bar you had to keep kicking away the hands of the drunk Rangers so they wouldn’t reach up and grab your ankles.

Anyway, the principal bought me a Greyhound bus ticket for St. Paul and said to go to Macalester College there and tell the head of the English department that he sent me. I took the bus, I walked in February through St. Paul asking people where the school was. I was wearing red long-johns that hadn’t been washed in a month under my jeans and sweater. I found the place, and a guy I will never forget..Roger Blakely...heard my story. I told him I wanted to write songs and stories and that I wouldn’t mind teaching high school English because after being in a big rich school in Chicago and a tiny poor school on the Canadian border, that I had seen good teachers and bad in both places.

Roger took me to the financial aid office that day and said to the director, "Wait ’til you hear this." The financial aid people were really nice to me, everybody was. I was pretty shell-shocked by then and had a chip on my shoulder, so all I kept saying was, "Look it’s not that big of a deal...I’m fine." They sent me back to the cabin with Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (to supplement my senoir year education) and made me a promise that I’d be there in the fall, that they’d work something out. They did. They gave me a full academic scholarship. Those people saved my ass. I loved my four years at their school. I never complained about the cafeteria once. After eating peanut butter sandwiches for a year and a half, the place was heaven.

So I did teach high school English, and I kept writing songs, and I tried to find a soul mate man who would love me. I made a few mistakes, but ended up here, in a happy house that I share with three fine developing young individuals, all of whom I love with all my heart. And now I finally have time to get this music thing right.