ABOUT

Carrington MacDuffie’s indie pop songwriting is the convergence of a lifelong immersion in music, language, voice, and spiritual and emotional inquiry. Though long known as an award-winning narrator with more than 250 audiobooks to her name, MacDuffie’s pursuit of songwriting lives at the heart of her artistic path. Born in New York City and of Scottish and English heritage, her background threads a lineage of explorers, printers, and revolutionaries — an ancestry that foreshadows her own independent creative path.

Music was a constant presence in Carrington’s early life. Her father’s eclectic record collection—ranging from Beethoven to Dave Brubeck, the Clancy Brothers to Neil Diamond—shaped her ear for melody and arrangement, and her favorite moments as a small child were spent singing and cutting up the rug with her sisters while her father spun the LPs. At 14 she taught herself to play the piano by writing songs, and upon playing her first open mic at 17 at a club in Greenwich Village, she was immediately hooked by the challenge of expressing her original vision to an audience.

Eclectic cabaret performances in New York City at night while working book publishing during the day eventually took her to the West Coast, where she merged an unconventional artistic sensibility with 4-piece rock and then with World music. In Venice Beach, she staged multimedia shows involving live painting, image projection, and body art. This experimental performance of her songs influenced her understanding of music as an immersive, embodied experience. MacDuffie claims to “experience life as a form of music, and this energy runs through my songs.”

Moving on to Seattle, she gained a reputation as a rising voice actor and a dynamic spoken word performer — using her powerful vocal presence to bring poetic texts to life in clubs and on indie stages. She co-owned a project studio during that time, further deepening her skills in production and sound design. She notes the feedback loop between the disciplines of narration and singing/songwriting: the rhythm, pacing, characterizations, and emotional truth required in storytelling/narration inform her phrasing and delivery as a vocalist, and vice versa.

Since relocating to Austin in 2014, MacDuffie has taken on the electric ukulele as both songwriting companion and performance tool, a shift that sparked a prolific period of recording that is ongoing. The albums Only An Angel, Crush On You, Rock Me To Mars, Kiss Make Better, I’m The One, and Sweet Little Mystery showcase her range—from spare, introspective ballads to buoyant pop structures layered with narrative complexity‚ always with her recognizable stamp. She records and produces with unusually creative musicians in Austin, Rochester, NY, and Nashville. These years have also seen a lot of time on the road, with months-long tours of Europe and the UK, appearances at Sundance and SXSW, and numerous gigs in Central Texas.

More recently she has released a steady stream of originals to US and UK radio, to all streaming platforms, and to her YouTube audience. Rebel in the House of Love is a driving cultural critique; Winter Song a contemplative ballad exploring the soul of winter; and Max From The Future offers a playful time-warping blend of sci-fi fantasy with romantic nostalgia. She is currently preparing to release a summer single, Better That Way, a defiant rocker with a touch of funk that proclaims the advantages of faith over doubt, to be followed by a delicious light-weight pop tune, Sugar Drip, for the fall. MacDuffie also dives into cover songs, to deepen her songwriting and sharpen her skills as a producer. Whether reimagining Run Rudolph Run as an EDM track or coaxing White Christmas into a seductive bossa approach, “Stepping into another writer’s structure gives me a new feel for what works—how to stretch myself to integrate it, and still bring it back home to my own indie-pop style,” she says.

Carrington’s work as a music video producer continuously generates highly engaging visual content — another means of expressing the emotional dimensions she constructs in her music. The video for her iconic The Kiss I Didn’t Get Last Night was screened at the Santa Clarita International Film Festival in 2022. Her music is hard to pin down stylistically, but listeners and critics have compared her work to David Bowie, The Cranberries, the Eurythmics, Buddy Holly, Lucinda Williams — a hybrid, perhaps, of classic pop, alt rock, dream pop, and poetic storytelling. Her vocal delivery, often layered with haunting harmonies and unexpected melodic turns, evokes both edge and vulnerability.

MacDuffie’s musical life is driven by curiosity and a commitment to transformation. She views each song as its own world—a place where language, sound, and spirit intersect. Whether writing a love song to a ghost, channeling heartbreak into cosmic pop, or delivering philosophical truth in plucky rhyme and rhythm, she writes not for the market, but for the moment—for the charge between people, the secrets under language, the electricity of a feeling that hasn’t yet found its form.