Heidi Muller

Poetic lyrics set to fingerstyle acoustic guitar and mountain dulcimer melodies have made Seattle-based Heidi Muller one of the Northwest's leading singer/songwriters and song interpreters. Muller's four self-produced albums, released on her own Cascadian label, have been enthusiastically received by folk music fans throughout the United States. Muller's "Good Road" is the theme song for Northwest Public Radio's Inland Folk show, while her 1989 album Matters of the Heart, was nominated as Best Folk Album of the Year in the Northwest Area Music Association awards. A finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival's New Folk songwriting contest in 1989, Muller inherited her love of music from her parents. Muller's mother played classic tunes of the 1920s and '30s on the piano, and her father loved to recite poetry. Muller was also inspired by an uncle who played East German folk music on the zither. Learning to play guitar at the age of eleven, Muller played in several high school rock bands. In the late 1960s, however, Muller was inspired by the folk-pop tunes of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor and traded her electric guitar for an acoustic model. While attending Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, where she earned an undergraduate degree in psychology, Muller shared a dormitory room with multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Gail Rundlett. The two women began to perform together as a duo in 1975, and became regular performers at church coffeehouses, Boston Ethical Society meetings and clubs including the Sword And The Stone in Boston. A turning point in Muller's musical approach came when she attended a performance by Bill Staines. According to a recent interview, Muller learned from Staines that "an artist could work independently without a record label or an...