Rees Shad

Born and raised in New York City, Rees has been recording music since he swiped his father’s reel-to-reel DictaphoneTM at four years old to record a song he had composed on the family piano. As a teenager, he began playing Greenwich Village clubs and hanging around recording studios as a sideman on sessions with Brill building songwriters. While still in college he renovated an early 19th Century barn into the first iteration of Sweetfish Recording Studios – a residential full production studio in Upstate New York.  

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Over the next fourteen years, Sweetfish would host scores of independent and major label acts from around the world and play a part in hundreds of releases. Shad then expanded Sweetfish into interactive marketing, music publishing, and record distribution, while continuing to produce, promote, and tour his own music.  

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In 2000 Rees closed shop and enrolled in graduate school, eventually earning three master’s degrees over a 20-year career in higher education where he developed curriculum for several different colleges and Universities and oversaw several degree programs he had developed for the City University of New York.  In 2013 he was awarded the Carnegie Foundations CASE NY Professor of the year award.  He left academia to return to recording and performing his music full time in 2021. 

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To date, Rees holds more than 450 copyrights, has released 17 international solo albums, and an additional 13 albums involving collaborations and side projects - all of which have garnered a combined 5.5M streams on Spotify alone.  His songs are rich in narrative and hybridize numerous genres in what Seth Rogovoy called Rees’ “relentless quest to push the boundaries of musical storytelling."
 

American Songwriter described his work as “sometimes terse, always tender, the songs resonate with emphatic emotions convincingly conveyed in every verse and chorus. “

Shad released his latest album ‘Porcelain Angel’ in March of 2025 to stellar reviews from Us and European critics alike. The album spent three months on the Folk Alliance international Folk Chart top ten list, with the single ‘Ain’t That The Way’ sitting in the #1 spot for April and May and the title track ‘Porcelain Angel’ holding the #1 spot in June. The album ended the year #23 of the top100 Folk albums of 2025 having been lauded for its “grace and elegance” (Americana UK), “all-knowing tonality” (Americana Highways) and as "a collective thing of beauty and fascination" (RnR).