Breaking: Kate Walsh

Who: British singer-songwriter Kate Walsh, whose homemade album Tim's House rocketed to the top of the U.K. iTunes chart thanks to the success of her single "Talk of the Town." Now, she's conquering America the old fashioned way: by infiltrating the soundtrack of a Grey's Anatomy spin-off.

Sounds Like: The acoustic Tim's House finds Walsh strumming ideal-for-late-night-listening classics in the style of Joni Mitchell and the calmer side of Fleetwood Mac. The home-recorded, do-it-yourself feel of the album is being praised as quite charming.

Vital Stats:

• "Talk of the Town" was inspired by Walsh's youth, during which she was forced to change high schools four times because of small-town bullies that lambasted her for dreaming big and wanting to ditch her small fishing village. "I felt I'd never be satisfied there, and people misconstrued that as arrogance," Walsh says.

• Walsh started to make waves in America after "Your Song" appeared on the Grey's Anatomy spin-off show Private Practice. The star of that show? An actress named, fittingly enough, Kate Walsh. That's synergy.

• While the melancholic songs on Tim's House are very much indebted to Walsh's ex-boyfriend, her next album may sound decidedly different, as there's a new man in her life. "I'm really happy—and I'm not writing anything! My manager might start telling [my boyfriend] to be horrible to me so that I have some material," Walsh says.

Hear It Now: Tim's House hits U.S. shelves on January 29th, but in the meantime, listen to her songs on her MySpace page. Above, check out the video for "Your Song."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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