Stephanie Dosen

Stephanie Dosen has cultivated an audience through her interpretations of lively yet ethereal acoustic folk, marked by a playfully surrealistic approach to lyrics, along with her striking blonde beauty and cheerfully eccentric persona. According to her own account, she entered the world on a Wisconsin farm where her family tended peacocks. After studying piano in childhood, she retrieved a neglected guitar from the attic and instructed herself on the instrument while her relatives gathered feathers from the birds. She soon composed original material and performed it for a fox and a swan that had become her regular companions; the animals, unable to clap, expressed approval by blinking. By 2002 she had begun presenting her work to human listeners and issued her first recording, the self-released collection Ghosts, Mice & Vagabonds. When several tracks appeared on her MySpace page, they drew the notice of Simon Raymonde, the former Cocteau Twins member who leads Bella Union Records. An ardent admirer of the Cocteau Twins, Dosen welcomed the contact, and she accepted his immediate offer to sign her and produce her next album. She moved to the U.K., where Raymonde helped shape her sophomore effort, the 2007 release A Lily for the Spectre. The album earned strong critical praise and achieved unanticipated commercial traction in England after “This Joy” appeared as a single.