Hungrytown is the folk music duo of Rebecca Hall & Ken Anderson. They met and started dating in New York City in 1993 while Rebecca was singing torch songs in Soho bars and Ken was a rock drummer. Three months later, they took a road trip together--a foreshadowing of trips to come--and got married a year later. Rebecca and Ken have been performing full-time since 2003, when they made the decision to quit their day jobs, move into a tiny house up in Vermont and head out into the vast unknown from there.
Rebecca learned to sing in church as a child, and was an experienced interpreter of jazz and blues standards by the time she was in her 20s. Her discovery of roots music coincided with the reissue of the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music in 1997, and inspired her to begin writing in earnest. She soon developed a reputation for simple, melodic and achingly beautiful songs, stirring modern themes into traditional song structures: "Hall's original compositions hark back to the earliest traditions of acoustic Americana, tracing a sepia-tinged line from the Carter Family to the contemporary lo-fi classicism of Gillian Welch," writes Steve Bennet of Acoustic Magazine.
Ken is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, who learned to play drums and organ as a young child, and has since moved on to bass, guitar, mandolin, banjo and harmonica. He is also a natural harmony singer, and his background in pop music is largely responsible for Hungrytown's unique vocal blend. Ken has produced all three of the duo's CDs, and his tasteful arrangements were soon singled out for praise, "Anderson has a knack for crafting rich arrangements that don't clutter things up," writes Casey Rea of Seven Days (VT) magazine, and shortly thereafter Ken began receiving requests from other performers looking for a caring and talented producer for their recording projects.
When Rebecca and Ken are not on the road, they spend their time at home recording their songs, producing CDs for other performers, or just sitting out on the porch.