KT Tunstall: Drastic Fantastic
KT Tunstall released her second studio album a few days ago. I really enjoyed the first and picked up the second last night. If you haven’t heard of her, I imagine you have still heard songs from her first release. She is really something else. She was playing a lot of smaller coffee shops, clubs, bars, and so on, so she worked on this digital contraption that allowed her to expand her sound. She would start recording and play a couple of bits of music, then play them back during her song performances. In this way she can sing her own backup vocals and even provide some rhythm.
I think I saw her first play on a show on PBS one evening. It’s always interesting to me to see how an accent (Scottish, in this case) nearly disappears while singing. Nearly, but not completely. 
Her first album is called “Eye to the Telescope” because her father was a physicist. If you’re into the whole Degrees of Bacon thing? Well, it works for me here. I have only 3 people in between me and KT… see I know “Jim” who runs KT’s web discussion board, and while he doesn’t know KT directly he does know people that do, so that makes me, Jim, the “next guy” and then KT. Fun. 
She had several hits off of her first album, including “Black Horse and a Cherry Tree” and “Suddenly I See” which I really like. There are some videos of her on youtube, here’s one of my favorites that really shows off her ability to loop / record / play back while performing:
And another, I think this is my favorite of her songs:
Both of these were from a VH1 concert, and they’re both worth a listen.