WHO A lady-killing U.K. singer-songwriter who's more than a pretty face. In the late Nineties, Blunt served four years in the British army, which dispatched him on a peacekeeping mission to Kosovo, posted him as sentry at the queen mother's coffin and had him ride a horse around London during the queen's jubilee, wearing an ornate helmet with a white plume and a sword. "It was a ridiculous costume," he says. "I was a tourist attraction." In 2002, Blunt traded his horse for a deal with Elton John's management company -- and got his big break opening for John on his 2004 tour of soccer stadiums in the U.K. SOUND Blunt has a gravelly voice that sounds a little like Rod Stewart's and a heartstrings-pulling sensibility that should win over John Mayer fans. His acoustic strumming was given a glossy sheen by Los Angeles producer Tom Rothrock, whom Blunt sought out after listening to his work on Elliott Smith's Figure 8 and XO. ALMOST FAMOUS Blunt has scaled the U.K. charts with his debut, Back to Bedlam, which kicked Coldplay out of the top spot, and has held it for eight weeks. He's poised to break big here after Bedlam's October U.S. release. "Brits sometimes have an obsession with cracking the States, and maybe we set ourselves up for a fall, since we don't understand that people have different musical taste there," he says. "But if I can connect musically with just one or two people -- in the way Cat Power does -- I'll be really happy." DEAR DIARY The first single, "You're Beautiful," is a lovelorn ballad about "what it's like to meet someone special and lose someone special," says Blunt, who describes his album as a diary. "They're songs about what it's like to be alive, to have friends, to be an individual in today's world." (Posted Sept. 8, 2005)
|
Advertisement Advertisement |
©RealNetworks, Inc. All rights reserved.
©Copyright 2009 Rolling Stone; Jann S. Wenner, editor and publisher
- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC.
Get RS Mobile
RSS