About

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Dear Simone is a musical project created by Courtney Mandryk and produced by Suz Slezak. It features friends and collaborators -- Suz adds vocals and instruments, as well as Shelley Faulkner, Katie Shepley,  Sam D'Agostino, Anthony Da Costa, and Molly Garden. It was mixed by Graeme Rosner, and produced by Daniel Goans of Lowland Hum.

GORJUS is an album inspired by a period of time of inter-relational trauma alongside inter-relational healing. The album is driven by the queer and creative communities in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. 

Other inspirations: nursery rhymes, slant rhymes, photography, unreliable narrators, personal truth, self-possession, singing to hold the darkness, playing piano with your whole body to process pain, and finding humor in the face of adversity. 

Courtney Mandryk is a musician, poet, artist,  mother, and graphic designer who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has her MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan and her MFA in Art from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Music, to her, is embodied poetry. Collaboration is one her greatest joys. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her two children, pets, books, and a piano that was born the year she was.