Laura Stark

"Cool and austere like lemon ice, yet warm and rich like melted chocolate" is how this emerging singer-songwriter's sound has been described. Imagine Emmylou Harris and kd lang were on a lonesome desert highway and picked up a couple of hitchhikers named Peggy Lee and Julie London along the way, then you might come close to what its like to listen to the voice of Laura Stark.This Texas musician has made London her home for over a decade, working solo and with bands. She has written instrumental soundtrack music, written a theme tune for a TV-pilot, penned a song for a Swiss Air ad campaign, and sang on a dance track for a British indie film. Although Laura has been composing, writing songs, and performing in bands since her early teens, her first real experience in the music business came in 1997, working as a singer and lyricist with a Japanese acid jazz label in London. Here she worked with Simply Red's Kenji Suzuki, while the Divine Comedy recorded upstairs!But the thoughts of the wide open spaces of home would influence her own songwriting more and more. She eventually began to play in London's best acoustic venues and attracted the attention of some of the UK's top musicians, including drummer Neil Conti (Deep Forest, Prefab Sprout, Annie Lennox) whose kinetic style gives an edgy tension to Stark's dark vocals, and London's own pedal steel maestro, BJ Cole, who can go from country twang to ambient atmospherics with one swoop of his slide and has collaborated with the likes of Alabama 3, R.E.M., Beck, Shania Twain, and Sting.Conti, who's also worked with Brian Eno and Bowie, has produced Stark's new album at his Magic Circle Studios in the South of France. The latest addition to the album is the guitar work of Van Morrisson guitarist, Dick Farrelly, and a duet featuring the romantic crooner of Irish band PERRY BLAKE. Stark has played at some of the most famous venues in London's Soho and West End, such as The Borderline, Tin Pan Alley's 12-Bar Club, Tony Moore's Kashmir Club, the legendary Ronnie Scott's, and also The Colony Room, David Hockney's favorite drinking den, famous for launching the career of The Magic Numbers recently.She has opened for many well known acts in the UK, including Tuvan throat singing punk group Yat-Kha. In the US, she's opened for hard core country twangsters, 16 Horsepower, at the famous Slim's club in San Francisco, as well as other gigs in LA, Texas and NYC. She has also performed live and had airplay on Internet Radio stations both in the US and the UK, and was a featured performer and guest last year on BBC Radio. Laura Stark, singer/songwriter, a Texan in London, is performing more than ever, but the memories of the heat and space and quiet of home still linger, showing that you can never really take Texas out of the girl, or her music.