William Fitzsimmons

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William Fitzsimmons

William Fitzsimmons (born 1978) is an American singer-songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee. His music has appeared on ABC's Brothers & Sisters and Grey's Anatomy spin-off Private Practice, MTV's Life of Ryan and Teen Wolf, The CW's One Tree Hill, CBS's Blue Bloods, ABC Family's Greek, Lifetime's Army Wives and USA Network's Burn Notice. To date, he has released: nine studio albums, one EP, one live album, one remix album and two cover albums. Fitzsimmons is the youngest son of two blind parents and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is said to have developed his multiple instrumental skills thanks to his father and mother, both amateur musicians. The house where he grew up featured a fully functioning pipe organ, hand-built by his father. He started playing the piano and trombone during primary school and took up the guitar while in middle school. He is also skilled on the banjo, melodica, ukulele and mandolin, and is known for mixing folk music with electronics in some of his productions. He is often compared to contemporaries Iron & Wine, Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith. Fitzsimmons' musical career only came after his master's degree in counselling at the University of Geneva and after working as a mental health therapist. During a summer break, in the middle of graduate school, Fitzsimmons recorded a collection of songs at home that would later become his debut album Until When We Are Ghosts, released in 2005. Fitzsimmons' writing often includes references to personal and family themes; in fact, his 2006 second album, Goodnight, also self-produced and recorded at home, is said to have been based largely on his parents' divorce during his teenage years, and his 2008 work, The Sparrow and the Crow, his first studio recording, was written entirely about his divorce following the latter. Fitzsimmons revealed to the music programme eTown that he recorded the album with a collaborator who he later learned was having an affair with his wife while they were working on the recording and stated that this delayed the release of this work. The singer's music was initially noticed mainly thanks to MySpace and touring with colleagues Ingrid Michaelson, Brooke Fraser and Cary Brothers, among others, and thanks to several song insertions in popular TV programmes such as Grey's Anatomy.

On 8 February 2011, Fitzsimmons released a music video for a song entitled 'The Tide Pulls from the Moon', taken from his album Gold in the Shadows, released in March of that year and featured on his European tour.

The follow-up album, Lions, was released on 18 February 2014.

On 12 May 2015, Fitzsimmons released the first mini-recording about his family, entitled Pittsburgh.

On 1 April 2016, he released the second of the pair, his eighth album, entitled Charleroi: Pittsburgh, Vol. 2. The album is about the grandmother he never knew: 'Charleroi is the second part of the Pittsburgh story. The album Pittsburgh was about the grandmother I knew. Charleroi is about the one I never knew'. Fitzsimmons embarked on a European tour to support the album's release in April 2016, visiting nine countries along the way.

On 21 October 2016, he released his first live album, entitled William Fitzsimmons Live. The album features songs spanning the singer's career, recorded live during performances in Chicago, Amsterdam and Paris. The album also contains a cover of Fleetwood Mac's 'Everywhere', recorded live in Cologne, Germany, the video for which was released on 19 October 2016. Abby Gundersen (sister of singer-songwriter Noah Gundersen, with whom Fitzsimmons toured in 2012), is featured on fiddle and vocals, while additional instrumentation was provided by Jake Philips (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, banjo and vocals) and Adam Popick (drums, synthesiser, Rhodes and acoustic guitar). In 2018, Fitzsimmons released the album Mission Bell. This was followed in 2021 by Ready the Astronaut and No Promises: The Astronaut's Return. In 2022 and 2023, he released Covers, Vol. 1 and Covers, Vol. 2, respectively.

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