Miranda Stone
Toronto, Ontario10 reviews across 3 releases
Miranda Stone is a Canadian singer-songwriter from the Niagara-on-the-Lake area of Ontario who later worked from Toronto through her independent label Earthdress Productions. She began writing songs at 16, studied book illustration, and brought a visual artist's sense of detail to music built around acoustic guitar. Her 1998 debut Brave was described as punk-folk: an urgent folk-rock set with an edgy yet silky voice, rhythmic guitar, unusual percussion, and arrangements that could move from mandolin to cello without settling into a standard Christian-music format. The 1999 live 1,2, Trash a Few, 99, 100 made the method clear: direct songs, loose performances, audience interplay, and mistakes left in place. By 7 Deadly Sins in 2002, the sound had become fuller studio folk-rock with blues and country touches, while questions of faith and redemption remained central.
In 2002, Stone met Chris Hale at the Cornerstone Music Festival while touring in support of 7 Deadly Sins. The album's title song later won a 2004 songwriting prize from the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals. Stone married Hale that year, and trips to India led her toward Hindi devotional music; she learned tabla and began developing a songbook of bhajans for personal and communal use. From 2009, she and Hale co-led monthly Yeshu Satsang gatherings in Toronto, combining North Indian devotional forms with Western musical training. Stone also contributed vocals and tabla to later recordings associated with those gatherings. Her work after the folk-rock albums therefore continued through devotional performance and music-making with Hale rather than a return to the Earthdress album sequence.
3 releases reviewed
1,2, Trash a Few, 99, 100
7 Deadly Sins