Lisa Stansfield

Deeper is the eighth studio album by British singer Lisa Stansfield, released on 6 April 2018. All songs were written or co-written by Stansfield and produced by her husband Ian Devaney and Snowboy.

Like Seven, released four years earlier, Lisa Stansfield's eighth album bounces from style to style with the singer's deeply impassioned, life-embracing approach a constant feature. Sophisticated pop, Motown/Philadelphia International-styled retro-soul, a few flavors of house, and even muted go-go and elegant drum'n'bass factor into the material. Most unforeseen is "Hercules," not an update of the Allen Toussaint classic but a fiery hero's theme that incorporates the Bo Diddley beat, a triumphant horn arrangement from master Jerry Hey, and the main riff from John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13." A few cuts rate with Stansfield's best. The title song sounds like it was designed to fit with smooth early-'80s R&B grooves like the Mary Jane Girls' "All Night Long" and Keni Burke's "Risin' to the Top."

Face Up is Lisa Stansfield's first offering for the new millennium, and on this disc she treads similar waters as on previous albums, except for a few more adventurous outings. The album's first single, "Let's Just Call It Love," incorporates the British garage 2step beats introduced to Americans and popularized earlier in 2001 by fellow Brit Craig David, and makes for an unusual but interesting leadoff single. The album's opener, "I've Got Something Better," is classic, funky Lisa Stansfield at her best, and the song gets more and more fun with each repeated listening. Other standouts include the Burt Bacharach-ish show-stopping ballad "How Could You?," the pleading "Don't Leave Now I'm in Love," and the set's most obvious hit, the breezy, disco-laced anthem "8-3-1."

Seven, produced and written with longtime creative partner and husband Ian Devaney, is Lisa Stansfield's first album in nearly a decade. Despite concentrating on her acting career during the intervening years, Stansfield's voice is at full power, with all the elegance and power of her earlier work. The album is simultaneously retro yet fresh-sounding, led by the organic throwback disco of "Can't Dance." Stansfield and Devaney get some expert help from drummer John Robinson and arranger Jerry Hey, session giants who are well known among credit-scanning fans of soul, disco, and crossover jazz. 2014 Deluxe Edition added four bonus tracks.

Complete Collection is a six-disc, U.K.-only set celebrating the breadth and depth of Lisa Stansfield's extensive and impressive career. It includes her five studio albums – Affection; Real Love; So Natural; Lisa Stansfield; and Face Up – as well as an exclusive sixth disc, with recordings from a 1992 Wembley date, club mixes (including a great Massive Attack version of "Live Together"), B-sides, and three songs from Stansfield's Blue Zone days. Not enough? Each studio album is augmented with at least two bonus tracks. Complete Collection is definitely the most comprehensive Lisa Stansfield retrospective; it borders on overkill. But since it's only available in the U.K. – and is also quite pricey – the single-disc Biography is perfectly acceptable for the casual Stansfield fan.

The Remix Album (titled The #1 Remixes (EP) in North America) is the first remix album by British singer Lisa Stansfield, released by Arista Records on 2 June 1998. It contains remixes of songs originally included on the 1997 album, Lisa Stansfield. The tracks were remixed by prominent US and UK producers: Hex Hector, Junior Vasquez, Victor Calderone, Frankie Knuckles, Hani, K-Klass, Mark Picchiotti, the Black Science Orchestra and the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The album garnered favorable reviews from music critics and reached number eighty-two on the Billboard's Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.

Having sold over 13 million albums, Lisa Stansfield can lay claim to being the UK's top female vocalist of the last 15 years. Biography, this 17-track compilation, would certainly back up her argument. Including her breakthrough as featured vocalist on Coldcut's "People Hold On", it also contains her debut proper ("This is the Right Time") and a string of absurdly memorable hits, such as "Change", "All Woman", "Never", "Never Gonna Give You Up" and her first Number One, "All Around the World".