Twice recently, songs by Chantal Kreviazuk have come up on my Pandora pop station, and each time I was compelled to look at who was singing. (That’s only happened one other time recently, and it turned out to be Paris Hilton. Oh well.) The second time, I looked because I was certain it was Kelly Clarkson and I wondered why I didn’t know the song already.
Not to say that Chantal sounds like Kelly. “Time” does sound a lot like the sort of thing Kelly would sing, a piano-driven, edgy pop ballad… and in fact, she has written songs for Kelly, Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani and most recently David Cook. Pandora says similar artists are Colbie Caillat, Sara Bareilles and Michelle Branch. She’s a Canadian classical pianist-turned-pop star, and you can definitely hear those classical roots on her original songs. She has a pleasant, strong, diverse voice and as I listened to several different videos on her YouTube channel (all embedding is disabled, sadly) and her MySpace, it became apparent that she is an excellent interpreter. My opinion of her songwriting is that she has the skill of Carole King, which is about the best thing I will say about anyone’s songwriting.
You may have already heard her without realizing it. Her cover of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was on the Armageddon soundtrack, “Time” played over the credits of the movie Uptown Girls, and plenty of other songs and covers have been on piles of TV shows and movie soundtracks. Chantal has been hitting the Canadian charts for 12 years, her debut album sold well in the US back in 1996, she’s been on Leno, and she has an excellent reputation as a songwriter for some of the most popular American acts. Looking at some of her co-write credits on Wikipedia, it’s apparent that she’s been all over everything I love in pop (and, okay, some I don’t love). And yet, I had never heard of her before this week. How do these things happen?
Anyway, I am now making up for it by spreading the love to you all. Here are links to iTunes and Amazon so you can pick up some of her stuff. I already have!
