Growing up in an Irish family, Carol Noonan was influenced early on by traditional British music. She gained popularity around the Boston area with her band, Knots and Crosses. With help from local radio, Creatures of Habit (their debut) sold well. The band's next album, Curve of the Earth, earned Noonan an Outstanding Female Vocalist award at the Boston Music Awards. She and the band later separated, giving her time to pursue a solo career. Ben Wittman produced her 1995 debut, Absolution; the LP also features Duke Levine (guitars, mandolin), Kevin Barry (acoustic guitar), Paul Bryan (bass) and Tom West (Hammond organ). Noonan Building and Wrecking followed in 1996, trailed a year later by Only Witness. Only Witness concluded Noonan’s three-album deal with Philo Records, and she retired from the music business to live in Brownfield, Me, with her husband, who sewed nets for fishermen. That business slowed with the decline in commercial fishing, however, and she returned to music, albeit on her own terms, starting a website (www. carolnooonan.com) and issuing her albums herself. The first of them was 1999’s Self Titled. Big Iron (2001) was a change of pace, a collection of covers of songs about the Old West. Then came the self-explanatory Christmas (2003). Another album of covers, Somebody’s Darling: Songs of War, Loss and Remembrance (2004), did not touch directly on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but was inspired by it. The brief The Water Is Wide (2005), a duo album with pianist Dana Cunningham, was released as a fundraiser for Noonan’s proposed arts center, which she built on her own property. The Stone Mountain Arts Center soon opened, and she gave concerts there, including shows in 2007 that were filmed for her first DVD, appropriately called Live at the Stone Mountain Arts Center and released in 2008 simultaneously with the CD As Tears Go By, a collection of 1960s covers. ~ John Bush & William Ruhlmann, Rovi