The Shywriter is Dana Colley, Billy Conway, & Laurie Sargent.
The Shywriter combines a deep respect for songwriting with a distinctive organic musical chemistry and creates music that is both difficult to describe, and yet resonates with a warm sense of familiarity.
From the beginning the band's manifesto was to create unusual music, as Dana and Billy did for years with the band Morphine. The Shywriter were brought together after the death of their friend and bandmate, Mark Sandman, leaving Dana and Billy without the band they had been a part of for ten years, with five records, (Rykodisc, Dreamworks) a Grammy nominated video and relentless worldwide touring.
In the year after Mark's death the two put together Orchestra Morphine, a nine piece rollicking celebration of the work of Morphine, and toured the US and Italy. One of the members of Orchestra Morphine was singer Laurie Sargent, and with her the seeds were sown for the music that would become The Shywriter.