A Girl Called Eddy is a woman with something to say and a unique way of saying it.
She may be a new name, but she's not some straight-out-of-the-box precocious teenager like Katie Melua or Joss Stone. For a start, unlike them she writes all her own songs - and to do that, she felt she first had to get some serious living under her belt. "The idea of being a songwriter didn't really come until my early 20s. It took me a long time to work up the balls and find I had something to say,” she admits.
On the other hand, she doesn't try to make out she's paid heavy dues in the school of impossibly hard knocks. "I don't want to make it sound like my life has been some horrific struggle," she reasons. "I've really got nothing to complain about. It was just all the normal stuff - death, disease, divorce, working shit jobs as I built up the courage to do what I wanted to do..."
Taking that hard-earned courage in hand, A Girl Called Eddy has come-up with an extraordinary debut record full of romance, elegance, sophistication and shimmering melodies that is certain to appeal to fans of the likes of Beth Orton and Aimee Mann.
The songs betray the influence of many of her musical heroes, from Bacharach and McCartney to Scott Walker and Brian Wilson via Todd Rundgren and the Carpenters. But they also reveal her as a unique voice and a disarmingly original talent who draws on her experience to create a series of highly personal and yet universal vignettes that are deeply moving and yet retain an irresistible pop sensibility.
Born Erin Moran, Eddy grew up in the small New Jersey town of Neptune, close to Asbury Park on the 'Jersey Shore'. It was a musical upbringing, for her father played trumpet on the weekend, her mother fed her an endless diet of Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra records and her older brother turned her on to the Beatles and the Monkees.
Piano lessons didn't really work. She couldn't stand being shown what to do and so taught herself to play by ear. She always thought she could sing and when she was old enough, began answering ads in The Village Voice looking for backing singers. Often, she’d make the long journey to Manhattan only to discover that it was an audition for some truly horrible covers band.
She tried another tack and took a job as a receptionist in a New York recording studio. There were uplifting experiences, such as meeting heroes from David Bowie to Paul Simon. And there were less salubrious moments, such as being asked to procure a supply of hookers in the bathroom for teenage rappers from the Bronx. It was all grist to the mill and if you ever get the chance to ask her, she has some hilarious stories about the behaviour of some major household names that are far too scurrilous to print here and quite probably slanderous, too.
The catalyst for her own songwriting came when her mother fell ill in 1997, an experience that directly inspired the song Kathleen on her debut album. "I didn't quite believe in myself until my mom passed away," she recalls. "Then I went for it. Music is the only thing I ever wanted to do. Suddenly I felt I had no choice."
She got a gig singing background vocals and playing keyboards with Francis Dunnery, with whom she toured Britain twice. Around the same time, she acquired the name A Girl Called Eddy. "I'm afraid there's no great profundity or mystery to it," she says. "Eddy was just a nickname that stuck and I ripped the girl bit from Dusty Springfield's album." Then she ingeniously blagged her way into support dates with Cousteau simply by ringing up their agent and offering her services. When she wasn't doing that, she sat in her Greenwich Village apartment writing songs at the family piano, some of which you can hear on her debut album.
A toe-in-the-water EP appeared in America in 2001, which brought her to the attention of various independent labels and led to an air ticket to Britain to work with producer Richard Hawley of Pulp.
"I jumped at the chance because I'm a complete Anglophile," she says. Just as well, for the Yorkshire-based Hawley decided to test her mettle by inviting her to record during the depth of a Sheffield winter. "Actually it suited the mood of the songs which is back alley and rain coming down rather than sunny uplands," says Eddy. "The people were down to earth and friendly and funny as hell and I rather liked the fact that it wasn't London."
The Hawley-Eddy pairing proved inspired and A Girl Like Eddy's album also features the band that graced Hawley's acclaimed solo release, Low Edges. "Richard got what I was doing immediately," Eddy says. "He didn't get in the way of the songs. He just made them better and more beautiful. And that's what a good producer does."
Full of wonderfully crafted melodies and intelligent lyrics, every one of 11 songs on the album tells a story. The poignant Kathleen is about Eddy's late mother. Girls Can Really Tear You Up Inside is about a friend who discovered he had a teenage daughter whose existence he had never suspected.
Did You See The Moon Tonight is about a boyfriend who was living in Paris while Eddy was in New York. The lovely Tears All Over Town and poppy The Long Goodbye are "pretty autobiographical", she admits. "I'm not very good at writing about nebulous stuff when there's so much to write about in real life."
And that's A Girl Called Eddy. A woman with something to say and a voice to say it with conviction and passion. She already sounds like one of the finds of the year.
