Lindsay Mac

Barbies & Broncos on WGN America's Bob & Tom Show



Stop Thinking at Mama Hillybeans during recording for FolkScene .



Rain at Hotel Cafe, Los Angeles. Jason Petrin guitar, Mona Tavakoli, cajon and vocals.



Lindsay Mac is a girl you'll not likely forget. The obvious is that she is the girl who straps her cello to her body. Like a guitar, she strums and plucks it while singing. "A classical education gone horribly wrong" is usually the gist of the local headline. Yet what you'll remember about this musician might not be the obvious. Beneath the headlines the single most valuable bow in Mac's indie-music-making quiver is her songwriting. Her songs of love, bewilderment, protest and reverence are what move Lindsay's fans to drive long distances, to pre-order CDs a year in advance and to spread the word to friends on opposite coasts and throughout the world. And thank God because that cello surely gets heavy.
As you might expect, the bulk of her instrument hasn't affected the bulk of her tour schedule (though buying an extra seat on the plane has its disadvantages). In her first two years on the road, Lindsay and her cello logged in nearly 300 dates, helping her find her audience and laying the groundwork for multiple North American tours and radio support. The focus of 2008 partly shifted in order to accommodate the recording of her sophomore release, Stop Thinking, though the touring has still been burly with several multi-month tours including the epic Falcon Ridge Folk Festival Preview Tour - 28 shows in 28 days - which included venues like The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. Mac also showcased at the 2008 International Folk Alliance Conference and performed on the Main Stage at the Falcon Ridge Festival in July.
Lindsay Mac has been on both the front cover and the cover of the Weekend section of the Boston Globe, the cover of Strings magazine, and has been featured in many other publications such as The New York Times' About.com, Northeast Performer, Music Connection, and the largest Spanish-language music magazine, Musico Pro.
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Lindsay Mac was born in Iowa to bohemian, party-hungry parents who likely fed her pork tenderloin and Midwest microbrews for breakfast. This explains a lot.
She was classically trained starting at the age of six in church choir and formal training in piano and cello came shortly thereafter. After attending a public high school and, in the summer, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Lindsay enrolled in Dartmouth College to study what else but medicine.
She took advantage of the College's foreign study opportunities and moved to London to study at the Royal College of Music and then briefly left Dartmouth to study at The San Francisco Conservatory as well as to be a professional ski patroller in Utah and bike messenger.
She returned to Dartmouth, graduated, and starting experimenting with her music while living in a cabin heated by a wood stove. It is there that she found her voice and her unique style was born. Fearing the cello might be used for kindling, she enrolled in Berklee College of Music and shortly thereafter began touring full-time. The rest is yet to come.