Biography
Northern Irish singer/songwriter Juliet Turner draws from longstanding influences such as Nick Drake and Carole King in her folk-inflected style, while her vocals carry echoes of Kirsty MacColl, yet her fusion of folk, pop, and electronics aligns closely with peers including KT Tunstall and Beth Orton. Raised in a musically inclined household in the small Northern Ireland town of Tummery, she participated in her local church choir and took part in school productions before relocating to Dublin for university studies, where she began seriously taking up the guitar and composing original material. During a 1996 exchange year in Glasgow, Scotland, she connected with the proprietor of the modest indie label Sicky Music, who arranged to capture several of her compositions backed by his own band. Cut across a single two-day session, the resulting release Let's Hear It for Pizza generated sufficient interest in her homeland to secure management representation and support slots alongside artists ranging from Arlo Guthrie to U2. Once her studies concluded, Turner and her manager established the independent imprint Hear This, which issued her follow-up Burn the Black Suit in 2000. Her next project, Season of the Hurricane, appeared in 2004 and reached the Irish Top Ten while attracting wider global notice; a live recording from 2005 further capitalized on that expanding profile.