by D.Chazan

Created on: February 26, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

When Katherine McPhee first sang the song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on American Idol season 5, I was totally wowed. This wasn't just because I liked listening to Katherine (although I did), but because the song was just that fantastic. That's how I discovered singer/songwriter KT Tunstall and that's why I bought her debut album "Eye to the Telescope".

If you didn't see McPhee cover that song (twice), perhaps you heard one of KT's other songs on television. Her songs have appeared on TV shows such as "Gray's Anatomy", "Criminal Minds", "The 4400", "The Loop" and "Windfall". You'll even hear her singing in the pilot for the new American TV comedy "Ugly Betty", and one of her songs is included in the soundtrack for the film "The Devil Wears Prada". That's quite an accomplishment for such a new voice in the music world. That KT is originally from Scotland, known better in the UK than in the USA, makes this even more of an achievement, and hopefully this will get her noticed even more. That all the songs from these appearances appear on her debut album is no surprise.

Really good singer/songwriters are few and far between these days and we seem to get far too many artists who have to depend on behind the scenes writers that don't always write songs that the singers can identify with. A good songwriter writes from the heart about things that touch them and will hopefully be about subjects that touch others as well. If a songwriter can sing their own songs, there is usually no one who can come close to their sincerity of performance. While I think both Katharine McPhee's performances of "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" were excellent, hearing the original on this album was an even better experience. Apparently, I'm not alone in this opinion since she was nominated for a Grammy in the 'Best Female Pop Vocal Performance' category for this song (but didn't win, unfortunately).

So what makes KT special? One of the things is that I think she shows a great deal of creativity in her lyrics. For instance, there's a line in Suddenly I See "she fills up every corner like she's born in black and white". This is both original and evocative in that we not only get an expression that is as far from a clich as possible, but it's also something that makes us stop and think. While not all of her songs are filled with poetic genius, I must admit that her use of language is far more sophisticated than what we have been accustomed to hear these days. Even when she's using what

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