HEIDI TALBOT

 

Look out for a new star in the glittering firmament of great Irish singers: with the release of her new album In Love and Light, Heidi Talbot is truly set to shine. Already well known to US audiences as lead singer with the Irish-American supergroup Cherish the Ladies, and following wide critical acclaim for her previous solo outing, 2004's Distant Future, Talbot now extends her talents over a broader, bolder musical canvas, in company with a stellar cast of guests.

Growing up in the rural village of Kill, Co. Kildare, Talbot sang in the church choir run by her mother, Rosaleen, meanwhile absorbing the vibrant array of music that filled the family home. "I'm the middle of nine children, it wasn't like I had loads of money to buy my own tapes and CDs," she recalls. "I would mostly have heard what everyone else was listening to, whatever was playing in the house. With my Mum, it was Nana Mouskouri and Dolly Parton, but then there'd be Guns'n'Roses and the Pogues coming from my brothers' bedroom - just a bit of everything, really."

At sixteen, Talbot enrolled at Dublin's celebrated Bel Canto singing school, studying for the next year and a half under its founder and director Frank Merriman - "the best teacher in the universe," according to Sinead O'Connor, another former student. Adapting the classical bel canto technique, mainly associated with opera singers like Maria Callas, for vocalists of any style, Merriman's method - also known as "bel canto storytelling" - focuses on using the voice as naturally as possible to communicate a song's narrative elements, teaching that certainly tells in Talbot's intuitive, eloquent phrasing.

 

"Ms Talbot is one of the most generous musicians I know. I love the way she sings and she loves what she does. She is CLASS!" (Eddi Reader)

 

"from the first note she hits, one gets the sort of hair-rising goose bumps that only come along every so often" (PopMatters)