Richard Shindell lives as both an immigrant and emigrant, crossing thresholds that informs his illumination of the human experience through narrative song. Shindell has studied to join the priesthood, inhabited a Zen Buddhist monastery, and busked in the streets of Paris.

Originally from New York, now living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Shindell is a writer whose songs paint pictures, tell stories, juxtapose ideas and images, inhabit characters, vividly evoking entire worlds along the way and expanding our sense of just what it is a song may be. From his first record, Sparrow’s Point in 1992 to his most recent release, Careless, Shindell has explored the possibilities offered by this most elastic and variable of cultural confections: the song.

Shindell’s career received a boost in 1997 when Joan Baez recorded three of his songs (“Fishing”, “Reunion Hill”, and “Money for Floods”) for her album Gone from Danger and invited the aspiring singer-songwriter to join her 1997–98 tour.

Shindell collaborated with Dar Williams and Lucy Kaplansky to form the group Cry Cry Cry. On their eponymous 1998 album, Cry Cry Cry covered an eclectic mix of songwriters. The trio toured in support of their album before resuming solo careers. In 2017-2018 the group reunited briefly. The resulting tour culminated in a live recording of their final show on April 15, 2018, at The Freight and Salvage in Berkeley, CA, all proceeds of which went to support Live Music Society.

In 2015 he joined Lucy Kaplansky to record another collection of covers, Tomorrow You’re Going. Consisting mostly of love songs, or love lost songs, it provided Shindell and Kaplansky an occasion to revel in their distinctive, two-part harmony with the backing of a top-notch band (Byron Isaacs, Dennis McDermott, Bill Payne, and Larry Campbell) – all thanks to the participation of a committed community of fans who financed the project via the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. The campaign more than doubled its funding goal in less than 48 hours.

Shindell continues to tour nationally in the United States, with the occasional forays into Canada, the UK, and Europe. Although known primarily as songwriter, Shindell takes a more holistic view of his career. Producer, writer, singer, guitarist, interpreter: it all adds up to a life in music.

During the pandemic, Shindell stayed in Argentina, out on the wide open Pampa, reading, writing, taking walks, doing a little experimental recording, and tending the garden. He now returns to the road for a limited number of performances. Innovative, original and occasionally spiritual, Shindell’s songs weave tales that interchangeably champion the downtrodden, exalt the disaffected or wax empathetic to those lost to society’s fringes. From lighthearted ballads and adulterous love songs, to dirges and diatribes that skillfully skewer politics, prejudice, war and religion, to the comic point-of-view of a cow stuck in a barbed wire fence, he has a unique ability to morph into the soul of the many and varied personalities he casts as narrators in certain songs—veritable novellas framed in haunting acoustic melodies.