Edie Brickell

Edie Arlisa Brickell was born on March 10, 1966, in Oak Cliff, a neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. She attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, and later studied at Southern Methodist University. While in college, Brickell was invited to sing with a local folk-rock group called New Bohemians. She subsequently joined the band as its lead singer. After signing a recording contract, the group’s name was changed to Edie Brickell & New Bohemians. Their 1988 debut album, “Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars,” achieved both critical and commercial success, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard albums chart and earning double-platinum certification. The album featured the Top Ten single “What I Am,” which climbed to number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts the same year. The band’s follow-up album, “Ghost of a Dog,” released in 1990, was an intentional exploration of their diverse musical influences.

Edie Brickell’s career extends beyond her work with New Bohemians. She appeared as a folksinger in the 1989 film “Born on the Fourth of July,” contributing her version of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” to the film’s soundtrack. As a solo artist, she released “Picture Perfect Morning” in 1994, which included the video for “Good Times” as part of Microsoft’s Windows 95 Companion CD-ROM multimedia samples. Her second solo album, “Volcano,” followed in 2003. In 2010, Brickell co-founded The Gaddabouts, a band featuring Steve Gadd on drums, and released two albums with them. In 2013, she collaborated with Steve Martin on the album “Love Has Come for You,” a partnership that led to a North American tour with Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. This collaboration continued with the 2015 album “So Familiar” and the 2016 musical “Bright Star,” for which she co-wrote the music, lyrics, and story.

More recently, Brickell has continued to engage in musical collaborations and releases. In 2017, she and Steve Martin were featured in the documentary film “The American Epic Sessions,” where they recorded “The Coo Coo Bird” using a 1920s electrical sound recording system. The Edie Brickell & New Bohemians released “Rocket” in 2018 and “Hunter and the Dog Star” in 2021. In 2023, she became a founding vocalist for the band Heavy MakeUp, which released its self-titled debut album in 2023, followed by “Here It Comes” in 2024. Brickell married singer-songwriter Paul Simon on May 30, 1992, and they have three children.