Arts & Entertainment

Local Folk Legend Home For Benefit Concert Tonight

Anne E. DeChant set to play at the T2P2 gala in Cleveland.

Anne E. DeChant is coming home.

The local folk music legend, who lived in Lakewood for 17 years, moved to Nashville, TN, four years ago to pursue her music career. 

Now, DeChant is returning to the North Coast to perform at a benefit concert in Cleveland on Friday.

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“I love to perform,” she said in a telephone interview from her Nashville home. “It’s the best way — the fastest, most effective way — to get people to listen to my music. Some songwriters don’t sing, but because I can perform, it helps me.”

DeChant started out her music career, as a girl in Avon Lake, playing at wedding receptions, BF Goodrich company picnics and church funerals.

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“It was a very small-town thing,” she said. “If there would have been an American Idol when I was a kid, I think I would have made it to the Top 5.” 

After realizing that she wasn’t cut out for traditional studies at college, DeChant cut her teeth performing at the Barking Spider on the east side of Cleveland.

Since then, she co-founded the local band Odd Girl Out; then went solo and put out lots of albums; and was recognized as the winner of Cleveland Scene’s Best Singer Songwriter in Cleveland (four times).

And then she moved to Nashville.

“I needed a new challenge,” DeChant said. “I could have stayed and continued to perform, but I just reached a point where I need to generate a financial cushion for myself. So I came (to Nashville) because it’s sort of a mecca for writers.”

She’ll perform some tracks from her new CD “Swing,” at the T2P2 + B2 benefit gala at the Battery Park Wine Bar at 6 p.m. Friday.

The concert — to benefit women in Northeast Ohio who are homeless or live in shelters — will support T2P2, an Ohio nonprofit that provides women with personal hygiene products, such as tampons — products that can't be bought with public assistance food stamps.

Each person who attends the show is required to bring an "unmentionable" product donation — such as tampons, pads, boxers or briefs.

For attendees who are unable to bring a product donation, cash donations (minimum $10) will be accepted at the door. 


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