Who Is Linda Chorney?

YET ANOTHER GRAMMY HEAD-SCRATCHER: Who is Linda Chorney and what is she doing in Grammy’s Best Americana Album category with such well-known acts as Ry Cooder, Emmylou Harris, Levon Helm and Lucinda Williams? She’s a 51-year-old singer-songwriter from Sea Bright, NJ, right down the shore from The Boss’ Asbury Park, NJ, and she’s been writing and recording for some 25 years. An Academy voting member, she submitted her sixth album, Emotional Jukebox, on her own Dance More Less War Records, which was bankrolled with $80k from a doctor friend, and followed up by drawing attention to the release (also available digitally on CD Baby) through The Recording Academy’s internal Grammy365 website, open only to NARAS members, the one place the org allows promoting your own candidacy. Told to put “consider” somewhere in the subject line to draw attention to it, Chorney wrote, “I accidentally asked my husband to consider having sex with me,” and before she knew it, received one of the five highest vote totals in the prestigious category, leaping over the likes of John Hiatt in the process. Chorney is now telling people her post on the site was instrumental in the album—which includes top-notch players such as guitarist Jeff Pevar and bassist Will Lee—getting heard and subsequently nominated. There is also chatter that the same thing nay have happened elsewhere on the ballot, including Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, where one of the nominees is someone named Ryan Shore for a movie called The Shrine, where he is competing with Daft Punk (Tron Legacy), Alexander Desplat (The King’s Speech, Harry Potter) and Clint Mansell (The Black Swan). (12/5p)