Bonnie & Taylor Sims

americana · roots · folk

Bonnie & Taylor Sims are a Texas-born, Colorado-based Americana duo made up of Bonnie Sims on vocals, mandolin and acoustic guitar and Taylor Sims on vocals and guitar. They met in the commercial music program at South Plains College in Levelland, Texas, where Bonnie's first year overlapped with Taylor's last; both won the school's bluegrass vocalist awards, were assigned a duet to perform together, and have played together since that night. They later married and settled on Colorado's Front Range. Both came up through bluegrass. Taylor co-founded Spring Creek in 2004, a band that moved from Texas to Boulder and in 2007 won the band competitions at both the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and RockyGrass in the same year; it recorded four albums, one for Rebel Records, before disbanding in late 2012, and Taylor took an Americana Song of the Year honour in 2011. Bonnie led Bonnie & the Clydes for roughly a decade and four studio albums. In 2020 the two consolidated their work under their own names, moving from string-band instrumentation toward Americana rock with bassist Bradley Morse and drummer Kevin Matthews. Alongside that they record with the producer Robbie Nevil as Everybody Loves an Outlaw; their song I See Red was placed in the Netflix film 365 Days, topped Spotify's global viral chart for eleven consecutive days, led to a Columbia Records deal in July 2020 and has since accumulated hundreds of millions of streams. Their self-titled album as Bonnie & Taylor Sims was released on September 15, 2023, preceded by the singles Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Texas Again. Bonnie is also a member of Big Richard, the all-female Colorado string quartet that mixes traditional material with covers of Radiohead, Billie Eilish and Lorde and sold out its first headlining show at the Gothic Theatre; she has argued against narrow definitions of bluegrass being used to exclude musicians, describing what the group plays as reaching beyond the genre.

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