The Circle Game

�70s girls inspired by Joni get their day in the sun via a new compilation

Comments (0) By Andy Beta Wednesday, Jun 14 2006

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Caroline Peyton is the only Canyon lady who ended up having a music career. She’s sung on Broadway; she’s done vocals in Disney films such as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Pocahontas. But her career path wasn’t exactly straight.

“I was a little guitar-playing, Joni Mitchell–imitating teenager singing through a vacuum-cleaner hose, making really weird noise with the Screaming Gypsy Bandits,” laughs Peyton on the phone from the front porch of her parents’ home in Mississippi. Though her Southern accent is thick, you wouldn’t know it from her silken, spot-on Joni imitation on “Engram,” one of Wayfaring Strangers’ most striking compositions, with its thorny and disjointed stream-of-consciousness lines about “hotel mornings putting devils in your drawers.” “I didn’t know what I was singing about,” Peyton admits, “but I made it sound pretty.” Peyton had struck out to study acting at Northwestern; soon, however, the times drew her to the Needmore Commune outside Bloomington, Indiana, where she hooked up with the Gypsy Bandits and jammed odd music at all hours. “We were ahead of our time,” she boasts. While her audition for Clive Davis ultimately fell through, her music has found fans in British DJ Gilles Peterson and in Japan, where her records have been reissued on CD. As for the songwriting, though, “I put my guitar down and never picked it back up.”

Becky Severson: A young girl, a guitar, an invincible summer

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And so say they all. Many of them wonder, though, what might have been, if they’d only known about each other when they were all so very young.

Muses Tomlinson, “We would have enjoyed sharing our songs and becoming friends. We each walked the same path for a while. I never imagined there were so many others.”

WAYFARING STRANGERS: Ladies From the Canyon| Numero Group