Rebecca Pidgeon is an award-winning actress, singer, and songwriter. While she is best known for her long résumé in television, film, and theater (in particular for the plays of her husband David Mamet) beginning in the late 1980s, her artful, self-penned songs and unassuming, crystalline voice are equally acclaimed if not as widely known. Her vocal range -- from plaintive alto to carefully eloquent, smoky contralto -- articulates self-penned songs that crisscross roots and indie rock, contemporary jazz-pop, film music, Celtic folk, and classy urban Americana. She issued her solo debut ,The Raven, in 1994. Her 2005 album Tough on Crime, initiated her multi-album working relationship with Grammy-winning producer Larry Klein. 2008's Behind the Velvet Curtain included four songs used in the film Redbelt. She set up her own Toy Canteen Records label for 2011's Slingshot -- another collaboration with Klein who produced and, along with David Batteau, co-wrote all but one song: a cover of Warren Zevon's "Searching for a Heart." 2014's Bad Poetry preceded a five-year recording break. She made up for lost time in the summer of 2019 with the double-album Sudden Exposure to Light.

Actress/singer Rebecca Pidgeon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, going on to study at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1986 she sang on a demo recording cut by her guitarist friend Roger Fife, and attracted the attention of the tiny independent label Red Flame, which immediately signed the duo to release the folk-pop effort Glances Askances; Pidgeon later fronted the group Ruby Blue, which in 1989 issued the LP Down from Above. Around that same time she made her feature film debut in The Dawning; she also co-starred in the London premiere of David Mamet's Speed the Plow, later becoming the acclaimed playwright's wife. Following her husband back to the U.S., Pidgeon subsequently starred in the world premiere of Mamet's Oleanna, and in 1991 appeared in his film Homicide; in 1994, she also made her solo LP debut with The Raven. The New York Girls' Club followed a year later, and in 1998, Pidgeon returned with Four Marys. Since that time, she's released the 2003 compilation album Retrospective and the studio efforts Tough on Crime (2005) and Behind the Velvet Curtain (2008). Her sixth studio album, The Larry Klein-produced Slingshot, featured the politically charged single "Disintegration Man." The album received largely laudatory reviews and precipitated the songwriter acting as her own producer for Blue Dress On, a deeply personal set that included a cover of the folk song "She Moved Through the Fair," and offered poignant original songs that meditated on the complexities of female desire and the angular nature of romantic relationships. With producer Tim Young, Pidgeon released Bad Poetry in 2014, a rockist change of pace that utilized a more complex set of rhythmic and atmospheric backdrops to accompany its edgier lyric themes than anything she'd done before. The dreamy yet tense single "Love Is Cocaine" and the funhouse swamp rock of "Breathe Into Your Mouth" were two of the cuts that received rave reviews from critics.

Pidgeon spent the next five years focusing on acting. She appeared alongside Felicity Huffman in a Los Angeles revival production of Mamet's The Anarchist in 2015. As her children reached their late teens and early twenties, Pidgeon felt the desire to return to music-making and touring. In the spring of 2019 she released two three-track EPs: Circus Delirium was produced by Thomas Doveman Bartlett, and Comfort was helmed by Fernando Perdomo. They were released in time to advance a May show at L.A.'s The Hotel Cafe, and New York's Rockwood Music Hall in June. The lead tracks from both EPs -- "Underwater Boys" from the former and "Don't Lie Darling" off the latter -- acted as the first singles from the Bartlett-produced, 20-track double album Sudden Exposure to Light, issued by Toy Canteen in July. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi