Eric Coleman got his performance starts in punk music and standup comedy. He was singing, songwriting, playing guitar and drums, and hanging out with a series of punk bands in Iowa before settling into playing at a seven-year stretch of open mikes, coffeehouses, folk festivals, and science fiction conventions. His song “Bang My Bald Spot” was played multiple times on The Dr. Demento Show during this time. In 2007 Daniel “gundo” Gunderson acted on Eric’s suggestion of a “hard rock filk band” and formed the band Toyboat, with which Eric played drums until hand ailments and surgeries forced him to stop in 2012. While Eric was a member, Toyboat was nominated twice for a Best Performer Pegasus Award.
Meanwhile, Lizzie Crowe was growing up in a literary and musical household, starting to write two novels and composing a piano piece by the age of 17. In college she worked at a bookstore and built basic websites to pay for her primary hobbies: Star Wars and Sailor Moon fandom and Renaissance reenactment. As a member of Shire Cuil Choluim in the SCA’s Kingdom of the Middle, she discovered madrigals and briefly became a Soprano of the Realm before moving to Chicago. There, S. J. “Sooj” Tucker persuaded her to attend science fiction conventions and introduced her to filk.
Eric had been writing music that wasn’t a good fit for Toyboat and that he didn’t feel he could do justice to as a singer. After hearing Lizzie’s amazing voice at a Windycon 2009 open filk, he asked her to join him onstage at Capricon 2010 to sing some of this material. Thus began a personal relationship between them that led to their marriage and a musical relationship that led to the formation of their filk duo, Cheshire Moon. The duo recorded four albums and two EPs of “mythpunk”-style filk, have been guests at many filk and SF conventions. In 2014 they won two Pegasus Awards; Best Filk Song for “Snow White, Red Road”, and Best Performer. They have no comparator within the filk community; their originality is a rare and beautiful thing
Significantly, in 2018 Eric founded the weekly FilkCast song podcast, which has allowed listeners around the world to hear live and studio filk recordings from the last half-century, many of which are so badly out of print that they would be considered “unobtainium”. For over six years and almost 300 bi-weekly episodes at the time of this writing, Eric and Lizzie have been hosting FilkCast and bringing a huge swath of the collective filk songbook to members of the global filk community who would otherwise not have an opportunity to hear it.
For these contributions to filk music and the filk community, Eric Coleman and Lizzie Crowe are inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame this fifth day of April, two thousand and twenty-five.