Darleen Wilson

Darleen Wilson

Photo: Bob Hannan

Darleen spent her early childhood in Roslyn, New York, where her fondest memories are of being enticed to take piano lessons from the next-door neighbor in exchange for cookies. Early on, Darleen learned to work the system amassing considerable skill on the keyboard while satisfying a sweet tooth. Her more formative years took place in Wilton, Connecticut, where like many comfortably middle class New England girls, she developed a love and fascination with Delta blues and death-obsessed English ballads (Goth without the black hair-dye).

Both of these musics somehow seemed to fit better on guitar than piano, and so she picked one up, gradually exchanging Debussy for Robert Johnson. Beyond the intoxicating mystery of the sounds emanating from the record player, she became entranced by the stories, the language, the poetry of the blues. Like many comfortably middle class New England girls, she kept a journal. Darleen became Wilton's philosopher queen, though this remained a secret to all of her subjects.

As a teenager, she mastered the arts of finger-picking, semicolons, and alienation from the Great Society being dreamed up around her. Between stints working in a mental hospital, she fled Connecticut for the wilds of Vermont, attending Marlboro College, a school that not-so-secretly harbors the notion that it invented hippies. Perfectly in sync with her out of sync classmates, Darleen disappeared into the woodsy environs, blues poets, and Mozart, eventually coming up for air to write her thesis on Don Giovanni, of all things, and earn a Bachelors degree, summa cum laude, in Music and Writing.

By now, it was the mid-seventies, and she fell in with a too-bad crowd in the waning years of the Cambridge folk scene. Beautiful women with long blonde hair and guitars were not uncommon in that milieu, but Darleen's uncanny aptitude for unraveling the mysteries of technology made her a welcome addition to the fold. Not only did she figure out how to turn the tape recorder on, she figured out how to make these beat-up instruments sound good. While those around her kept the spirit of Guthrie and Leadbelly alive, Darleen immersed herself in the art of microphone placement, track bouncing, and quasi-parametric equalization.

By the end of the decade, she was working fulltime at a budget-conscious studio where she encountered the acolytes of Johnnies Rotten, Cash and Coltrane, before catching the attention of a horde of sensitive singer-songwriters in need of sonic direction. During a stint at Maurice Starr's Mission Control (where she witnessed the birth of New Kids on the Block), she snuck in some of these talents after hours, resulting in some sparkling recordings and making a name for herself as a producer for the second Cambridge folk revival. Recording Patty Larkin, Shawn Colvin, Bill Morrissey, Catie Curtis and a host of others established Darleen as the philosopher queen of the Boston folk scene, a secret that was impossible to keep (she's certainly the only member of Birdsong At Morning to have had her name in Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly).

It was in the capacity of producer that she met Greg and Alan, though as part of different projects. After a few years of a purely professional relationship, and both recently divorced, Alan and Darleen fell in love. By the mid nineties, the music biz was on the skids and the writing was on the wall. Darleen grabbed hold of a computer modem, followed it across the Internet, and emerged an expert on multimedia web production. She bid a pleasant farewell to studio work with Cry Cry Cry and a live recording of Chris Smither, and in 2000, joined the staff at WGBH where she eventually became director of WGBH Online.  In 2009 she set up Vast Company, which she continues to operate today.

Sometime in early 2000, while trying to move decades worth of analog tape, she stumbled upon her old Martin guitar, covered in dust and in need of repair. The poet in her sensed a powerful metaphor. Alan sensed something more and got the Martin fixed for her, transforming metaphor into possibility.

This act of rediscovery and transformation has been the central inspirational force behind the formation of Birdsong At Morning, and the adventure continues as she grapples with the joys of amplified sound, expanding both the band's, and her own, sonic palette.