Multi award-winning recording artist Katie Melua has announced an extensive 45-date headline 2020 tour, including 18 UK & Eire dates. The announcement of the tour coincides with news of a ‘Live In Concert’ 2xCD album featuring Gori Women’s Choir, recorded at London’s Central Hall, Westminster, in December 2018. Gori Women’s Choir first worked with Katie on the silver-certified 2016 album ‘In Winter’. That album was recorded in Georgia, and commanded some of the finest reviews of her career with the Sunday Times describing it as “bewitching…ravishing…spellbinding” and the Independent as “exquisite” and “remarkable.”
With combined U.K. album sales of nearly three million copies, Georgian-born Katie Melua has quietly become one of the biggest-selling female artists of the decade. Without the media profile of Britney Spears, the powerhouse vocals of Anastacia, or the critical acclaim of Dido, her success has been based purely on old-fashioned songs that have managed to have appeal beyond the usual folk-pop market. Indeed, just like her biggest influence, Eva Cassidy, who appears here on a posthumous cover of "What a Wonderful World," Melua's soothing and jazz-tinged tones found an audience through repeated plays on Terry Wogan's BBC Radio 2 show. So the fact that the majority of The Katie Melua Collection never really moves past first gear shouldn't come as any surprise.
English listeners went mad for Katie Melua with the release of her debut album in late 2003. Issued domestically in June 2004, Call Off the Search posits the lovely Melua pristinely in between pop, adult contemporary, and traditional American musical forms, with savvy marketing handling the finishing touches. (Think Norah Jones.) It's a comfortable, lightly melodic affair that drinks red wine safely in the middle of the road. Raised in Soviet Georgia and the United Kingdom, Melua has a beguiling accent that colors the ends of her phrases, adding character to her velvety, if occasionally only satisfactory singing voice.
Secret Symphony is the fifth studio album by singer-songwriter Katie Melua, and was released on 5 March 2012. The album was recorded at Air Studios in London in collaboration with orchestrator and conductor Mike Batt. Melua said in a statement: "This album was going to be my 'singer's album'. I had always wanted to do this one day; singing other people's songs brings something out of you and your voice that isn't perhaps where you would have gone vocally with your own material." She added: "It stretches you. As it happened Mike and I did write a couple of new ones, but the general idea was to find songs by great writers such as Ron Sexsmith ('Gold In Them Hills') and a favourite song of mine, originally recorded by Bonnie Raitt ('Too Long At The Fair') plus some more well-known ones like Keeping The Dream Alive." The lead single, "Better Than a Dream", and the track "Walls of the World" were both originally recorded by Melua's longtime collaborator Mike Batt, for the TV series The Dreamstone and his 1977 solo album Schizophonia respectively.
English listeners went mad for Katie Melua with the release of her debut album in late 2003. Issued domestically in June 2004, Call Off the Search posits the lovely Melua pristinely in between pop, adult contemporary, and traditional American musical forms, with savvy marketing handling the finishing touches. (Think Norah Jones.) It's a comfortable, lightly melodic affair that drinks red wine safely in the middle of the road. Raised in Soviet Georgia and the United Kingdom, Melua has a beguiling accent that colors the ends of her phrases, adding character to her velvety, if occasionally only satisfactory singing voice.
Britain's Katie Melua returns to her intimate pop sound with 2020's artfully textured Album No. 8. The album is Melua's first proper studio follow-up to 2013s Ketevan and arrives four years after her majestic holiday collaboration with the Gori Women's Choir, In Winter. While a return to her original alternative pop style, Album No. 8 is nonetheless a creative departure from her past work. Produced by Leo Abrahams, it finds Melua in a deeply introspective mood, crafting lightly experimental songs that evince the influence of '70s Krautrock and more-contemporary indie rock influences. Most noticeable in this tonal shift is a change in Melua's vocals.
With a voice that sounds like a more mainstream version of the late jazz cult superstar Eva Cassidy and smoky raven-haired looks to rival a movie lot's worth of young ingénues, it's a bit of a surprise that Katie Melua has remained so unknown in the United States, despite the chart success the Eastern European-born songstress has achieved in her adopted home of the United Kingdom. It seems like she should be at least as popular as, say, Regina Spektor or Nellie McKay. Pictures may not help that much, however, because in comparison to its fairly straightforward jazz-tinged singer/songwriter predecessors, Melua's third album takes a bit of a left turn into the self-consciously quirky. It's a wonder that it took so long, because Melua's producer and part-time songwriter is Mike Batt, a minor legend of the U.K. music scene who has fashioned a decades-long career out of deliberate eccentricity…
Piece by Piece is the second studio album by British-Georgian jazz and blues singer Katie Melua. It was released on 26 September 2005 by Dramatico Records. In the United Kingdom, the album debuted at #1 with 120,459 copies sold in its first week and to date has gone platinum four times. Georgia-born (as in the country, not the state) singer/songwriter Katie Melua found herself atop the British charts in 2003 with her breezy debut, Call Off the Search, which sold over three million copies in Europe alone. Her laid-back blend of blues, jazz, and pop with a kiss of worldbeat drew comparisons to Norah Jones, and rightfully so. She sticks to the formula on her lush, ultimately safe follow-up, Piece by Piece.