Crossover Media, an online music magazine, starts off a piece on vocalist Stacey Kent this way: “Stacey Kent, for whom jazz and the “Great American Songbook” formed the musical wallpaper of her East Coast adolescence.” Now that sounds very rich and like the kind of a foundation immersion of listening experience that should be a required staple for any aspiring artist to gain a hold on what it is that separates great ones from a pervasive crowd of far too many, ‘pleasant enoughs’. Stacey’s voice and artistry treats the song with a grace of intimacy and focus. She finds all points of beauty in the lyric and melody and plays with it at the surface and in the weaves of harmony and line.
This defining quote in, Stacey’s words, comes from a piece by Daniel Falconer in an article in Female First: “I’m a singer of love songs and a teller of stories. I’m drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms.”
Kent, the artist, stands for the heart of the soul of the song.