Carmen Consoli

Born on September 4, 1979, in Catania, Italy, Carmen Consoli picked up the electric guitar at nine and assembled her first band, Moon Dog's Party, four years later. That cover group specialized in material by Otis Redding, Tina Turner, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin, choices that put her powerful and distinctive voice in the foreground. Francesco Virlinzi, founder and producer of Cyclope Studios, caught one of her early shows and, impressed by her ability, urged her to start writing original songs. She arrived at his studio in 1994 with enough material for a debut; Due Parole appeared in 1996. Its opening single, “Amore di Plastica,” written with fellow Sicilian Mario Venuti, finished eighth at the Sanremo festival that year, yet it was the follow-up, Confusa e Felice (1997), that established her as one of Italy’s most promising new artists.

Consoli kept a rapid pace, spending the balance of 1997 on the road while preparing her third album. Released in 1998, Mediamente Isterica shifted toward a harder rock sound than its two predecessors. The year 2000 proved especially eventful for the Sicilian singer-songwriter: she promoted Stato di Necessità on tour, saw its track “L’ultimo Bacio” featured in Gabriele Muccino’s award-winning film of the same title, collected several Italian music prizes, and launched an acoustic trek whose performances were captured for the live album L’Anfiteatroelabambinaimpertente (2001) inside Taormina’s ancient Greek amphitheater. A French-market edition of the studio album, titled État de Necessité, surfaced in 2001.

Her fifth studio set, L’Eccezione, arrived on October 23 the following year in partnership with MTV Italia, which proclaimed the date “Carmen Consoli Day.” The occasion included the first MTV Italia Unplugged concert, later issued on CD in 2003 as Un Sorso in Più. Also in 2003 came Carmen Consoli, an English-language adaptation of L’Eccezione. Consoli made her initial United States appearances in 2004, playing New York and SXSW in Austin; she returned to New York the next year for a three-city “mini-tour.” In 2006 she released her sixth studio album, Eva Contro Eva.